How to record game clips on the Steam Deck
Clip and share your Steam game adventures (or mishaps) on the move
Anyone looking for how to record game clips on their Steam Deck will have, until recently, been starved for decent options. Decky Loader allows for a decent screen capture plugin, for instance, but even that’s on the overly basic side. Enter Steam’s own Game Recording feature – a flexible bundle of game-clippin' tools that’s now emerged from beta and is available to all Steam Deck users on the SteamOS Stable branch.
As far as handheld recording majiggers go, there’s currently little reason to use anything else, not least because Game Recording is built right into the Steam Deck’s operating system. As such, it’s highly configurable and, once you get to grips with the recording process, easy to use and share clips with. Its only problem is that it doesn’t explain itself all that well at first, but good news: you’re reading a guide. Here, I’ll walk you through how to capture footage using both of Game Recording’s two modes, as well as how to save and share those highlights with pals.
While certain interfaces have been reworked for SteamOS, these are essentially the same recording tools that you get with Steam’s desktop client. There’s also a newly-added shortcut for instantly clipping the past 10 seconds you’ve played in Record in Background mode, which is extremely useful for capturing those amusing moments that you didn’t see coming. Even if the shortcut, Steam + Up, seems like it was chosen specifically for people with three hands.
Game Recording on the Steam Deck has also become much better at correctly capturing games opened via non-Steam launchers, like the Xbox Cloud Gaming app for streaming. In the beta, trying this would just record a black screen, but now it can record non-Steam games just as well as native fare.
The only potential drawback, then, is the performance hit. Whereas beefy desktop PCs can offload the strain of game clip recording to a dedicated graphics card, the Steam Deck – and its fully integrated APU – doesn’t have that luxury. As such, you’re more likely to see a slight performance dip when recording. Anecdotally, I seem to lose about 3-4fps while Game Recording is active; that might not sound like a lot, but if your game is a tough AAA number that can only just run at 30fps normally, that lil' reduction could take you down into the sluggish twenties. Conversely, games that can comfortably hit 50-60fps (or higher, on the 90Hz Steam Deck OLED) won’t really feel it.
How to record game clips on the Steam Deck
Step 1: You’ll need to begin by enabling Game Recording in your Steam Deck’s setting. Press the Steam button, select Settings, then scroll down to the Game Recording section in the sidebar. Just like in the desktop client, you can choose between either Record in Background or Record Manually modes.

Step 2: Upon choosing a mode, some additional settings will appear below. Most of these you can leave on their defaults, but feel free to customise the recording quality – higher-quality footage will look clearer, but eat up more storage space – and, for background recording specifically, the recording length and size limits. If you exceed these, background recording won’t stop, but will start overwriting older footage. Be warned.
You can also change the timeline marker shortcut (Steam + Y by default) and, in Record Manually mode, the start/stop recording shortcut (Steam + A by default).
Once you’ve selected a mode, you’re ready to launch a game and get recording. First, we’ll go over how to use Record in Background most effectively, then switch to Record Manually mode.
How to record game clips on the Steam Deck: Record in Background
Step 3: Simply launch a game and Steam will start recording in – yes! – the background. This is fully automatic, and recording will end itself whenever you close the game. At any point, you can use the timeline marker shortcut (Steam + Y) to drop a blue marker on the background recording’s timeline – to help you find a particularly entertaining moment, say – but you don’t need to worry about manually starting and stopping the capture process.
The exception would be if you want to use the Steam + Up shortcut to instantly create a clip of the past 10 seconds, which you can do at any time. This won’t stop or otherwise interfere with the background recording, so feel free to snap these snippets liberally.

You also don’t need to wait to start viewing, editing, and sharing clips. While playing, hit the Steam button, then navigate to the right and down to the Game Recording section. Here, you can select "View Background Recording" to immediately review your current recording-in process, or "View Recordings" to watch back older recordings. The "Recording Settings" button will also let you tweak the Record in Background settings mid-game, or to switch to Record Manually mode.
Step 4: When viewing a recording, tap the Y button to bring up the timeline and editing menu. Full details on clipping and publishing are below, in the "How to edit and share clips" section, but in short: use the L2 and R2 buttons to skip forward and back, and separate clips can be saved by using the scissor-icon Start Clip and End Clip tools to highlight a section of the timeline in yellow. From there, tap the big yellow Save/Share button in the bottom-right corner; you’ll be offered options to save the clip to your Deck, share it online, or send it to another PC that you’ve signed into Steam with.

How to record game clips on the Steam Deck: Record Manually
Step 3: While playing a game, press your "Start/stop recording" shortcut – remember, unless you changed it that’s Steam + A. Just use the same shortcut again to stop recording, and boom, you’ve got a clip. You can look out for the pop-up in the bottom-right corner to confirm that clipping has started and finished.

To watch clips back without leaving your game, press the Steam button, navigate to the right and then down so that you can access the Game Recording overlay menu. Select "View recordings" and you’ll get a library of all your previous clips for that game.
Step 4: Press the Y button to bring up the full playback and editing interface. You can use L2 and R2 to rewind and fast forward, or select the scissors icon to snip the clip into a shorter version. More on this in the next section, but do make sure that if you make any edits, be sure to save the new clip by tapping the yellow Save/Share button and choosing one of the options.

How to edit and share clips
Step 1: Open up your clip, or background recording. All of these are accessible either from within the Steam overlay (using the aforementioned Steam button > Game Recording > View recordings route) or in the Library page of the game they were recorded in. Recent recordings are clearly visible at the top of the Activity section; older clips will be under the Your Stuff tab. Scroll down to the Media section if you can’t immediately see these.

Step 2: Select your clip and press the Y button to open the timeline interface. If you just want to share a clip as it is, with no additional editing, tap the button on the very far right (with an arrow point upwards). If your clip is under 60 seconds long, you can select "Sent to Other Devices", which sends the clip to another PC you’ve signed into Steam with; "Send to Phone", which send it to the Steam app on your phone; "Create QR link", which provides a QR code you can scan with your smartphone camera to view the clip in a browser; or "Share to a chat", which can pop the video directly to your Steam friends and group chats.
If the video is over 60 seconds, you can still send it to another device, but not send it to your phone, create a QR code, or share via Steam chat.

Step 3: If, on the other hand, you want to trim down a clip (or extract one from a background recording), you’re gonna need the editing interface. Start by selecting the scissors icon that appears on the Y button menu. Here, use L2 and R2 to move the timeline’s playback indicator to where you want to start the clip. Tap the "Start Clip at Current Playback" icon, which is the pair of scissors cutting through a dotted line on the left.
Then, move the playback indicator to where you want to end the clip, and tap the "End Clip at Current Playback icon" – that’s the scissors cutting into a dotted line on the right. The blue timeline bar should now have a yellow section, representing your clip.

Step 4: Tap the yellow Save/Share button and choose an option. "Save clip" will replace the full-length clip with your new, shorter version, while "Save new clip" (or "Save clip to Media" if you’re editing a background recording) keeps both the new clip and the original footage. The other four sharing options are the same ones explained in step 2 above.

Sadly, the Steam Deck has no way to export your clip as an MP4 file, like the desktop client’s Game Recording feature does. You could, however, use the "Send to Other Device" option to share it to your PC, then access and create an MP4 from it there.