I figured this would be basic video recording built into steam, and that is a nice feature alone. But they seem to really be trying to make it better than other similar features, not just more...
I figured this would be basic video recording built into steam, and that is a nice feature alone. But they seem to really be trying to make it better than other similar features, not just more convenient. Having player marked and game marked segments of footage is really cool!
They're genius for continuing to add value to their platform; for users and devs. It's the only reason I'm actually okay with using their launcher/service.
They're genius for continuing to add value to their platform; for users and devs. It's the only reason I'm actually okay with using their launcher/service.
SteamInput, for all its faults, is one of the greatest accessibility tools of all time. Remap all the things, even for games where that is impossible otherwise.
SteamInput, for all its faults, is one of the greatest accessibility tools of all time. Remap all the things, even for games where that is impossible otherwise.
They may be a monopoly*, but they know they can't be slipping up because there are competitors that will rise up. Still, I do prefer to not keep all my eggs in one basket when I can help it. Too...
They may be a monopoly*, but they know they can't be slipping up because there are competitors that will rise up.
Still, I do prefer to not keep all my eggs in one basket when I can help it. Too many times where other seemingly benevolent companies turned into the stuff they sought to free themselves from during founding. Gabe won't live forever.
At this point, if I was coming in fresh, and Steam didn't have all this value-add, I'd probably just end up using EGS. There's a reason Epic is pushing it so hard, to the point with the latest...
At this point, if I was coming in fresh, and Steam didn't have all this value-add, I'd probably just end up using EGS.
There's a reason Epic is pushing it so hard, to the point with the latest patch they broke my method of launching Fortnite in Steam with a "Use ESG launcher" error: They know the Fortnite gravy train isn't forever.
But Steam has built in remote gaming capabilities, including for VR. Family sharing. Amazing Linux integration. A console controller mapper....I can use a steam controller, 2 joycons, and a PS4 controller and it * just freaking works.* Killer features which they deployed years ago knowing their dominance is a fragile one. EGS is the first one that is putting up a decent fight.
They do, but it's not in the stuff that is flashy and "high impact". For example, they are nearly caught up with regional pricing. And I'm pretty sure they have support in some places steam...
They do, but it's not in the stuff that is flashy and "high impact".
For example, they are nearly caught up with regional pricing. And I'm pretty sure they have support in some places steam doesn't. But that won't make the headlines
I mean, it's a good call on their end. Fortnite is very popular with kids who, to some extent, have not even entered puberty yet. Once they do, they will want to differentiate themselves from...
They know the Fortnite gravy train isn't forever.
I mean, it's a good call on their end. Fortnite is very popular with kids who, to some extent, have not even entered puberty yet. Once they do, they will want to differentiate themselves from "children" by playing something else. It's a huge, but fleeting success.
And while I give them props for that, I think the lack of development that the epic store has seen makes me think that they aren't reacting properly to it and will keep relying on exclusives to push it. Personally I think Valve should start publishing games too. Not make them exclusive, but say that they have to release on Steam, and beyond that just focus on giving good people money to make good games. Valve has basically infinite money and could publish some real avantgarde shit of they wanted to.
Roblox has survived on new rounds of children coming in. I think Fortnite has staying power especially because they introduced a Roblox-like custom game system.
Roblox has survived on new rounds of children coming in. I think Fortnite has staying power especially because they introduced a Roblox-like custom game system.
I've tried this and I find it incredibly inconvenient to have my library spread across multiple stores/accounts/launchers. So I'm more or less all-in on Steam at this point and if it goes belly...
Still, I do prefer to not keep all my eggs in one basket when I can help it.
I've tried this and I find it incredibly inconvenient to have my library spread across multiple stores/accounts/launchers. So I'm more or less all-in on Steam at this point and if it goes belly up, I will resort to piracy of my existing library. I have very few moral qualms about piracy of non-indie media in general, but absolutely no qualms about pirating things I've already paid for.
I'm still that person who keeps a folder of desktop launchers for games, so the location of the games never bother me. My first instinct is usually typing a game I'm playing in a search bar...
I'm still that person who keeps a folder of desktop launchers for games, so the location of the games never bother me. My first instinct is usually typing a game I'm playing in a search bar anyway.
If I do need a comprehensive view, GOG Galaxy worked well enough for me. Open source, plenty of plug-ins (even with your console game accounts), clean interface.
The Xbox One had something that was basically identical to the game markers early in its lifetime. It sounded like a really good idea on paper but it ended up leading to tons of people asking why...
The Xbox One had something that was basically identical to the game markers early in its lifetime. It sounded like a really good idea on paper but it ended up leading to tons of people asking why they had dozens of clips they don't care about clogging their library of game recordings. Hopefully Steam will have a more a more elegant offering.
Steam will begin recording automatically when you start playing so you don’t miss those unexpected moments.
You specify the hard drive space limits. Once full, the oldest gameplay will be overwritten as new gameplay is recorded. You can watch, create and save video clips from these recordings.
Right, that's a good step in the right direction and we'll have to see how well it works in practice. Ideally the timeline-enhanced games will provide options to players to enable/disable specific...
Right, that's a good step in the right direction and we'll have to see how well it works in practice.
Ideally the timeline-enhanced games will provide options to players to enable/disable specific types of moments.
For example, let's say a PVP game is set to automatically record every time you complete an objective, every time you level up, and every time you get a kill. If you're someone that doesn't care about kills and only wants to record objectives you would be upset if you completed an objective in a cool way but then that was overwritten because during the rest of the match after that your timeline was flooded with clips from killing enemies or leveling up.
IIUC, the way the game integration works is just that the games will automatically attach timestamped markers to the recording, not that they will create distinct clips. After the game has ended,...
IIUC, the way the game integration works is just that the games will automatically attach timestamped markers to the recording, not that they will create distinct clips. After the game has ended, the user goes back into the review/clip editor tool and can jump around to those markers to clip what they actually want to separate out.
The user can also manually create those markers with a hotkey, although when I tried it out it didn't seem to show the markers in the editor.
This is good timing, I'm getting frustrated with geforce experience/gamebar corrupting my clips and leaving me with a useless pile of bits. I'll definitely check this out!
This is good timing, I'm getting frustrated with geforce experience/gamebar corrupting my clips and leaving me with a useless pile of bits. I'll definitely check this out!
What amazes me is that Steam has literally no direct competition in regards of functionality, yet they keep adding some amazing stuff all the time that sets them apart from the competition even...
What amazes me is that Steam has literally no direct competition in regards of functionality, yet they keep adding some amazing stuff all the time that sets them apart from the competition even further.
For example, Steam has a client for Linux (looking at you GoG, this is costing you money literally every day). And no, I don't want to hear about workarounds, I want a Linux client.
literally no direct competition
For example, Steam has a client for Linux (looking at you GoG, this is costing you money literally every day). And no, I don't want to hear about workarounds, I want a Linux client.
Steam has workarounds too. No point in making a client for games that don't support it. Steam just had the revenue todo R&D on a not-emulator approach to solving the problem. And as much as I love...
Steam has workarounds too. No point in making a client for games that don't support it. Steam just had the revenue todo R&D on a not-emulator approach to solving the problem.
And as much as I love GOG and Linux, a Linux client won't suddenly shoot its marketshare sky high.
I understand your comment and I didn't claim that anything would skyrocket their revenue. I would prefer to purchase from GoG myself. But as long as Valve provides good support for Linux and...
I understand your comment and I didn't claim that anything would skyrocket their revenue. I would prefer to purchase from GoG myself. But as long as Valve provides good support for Linux and nobody else does, the path of least resistance for casual gamers is going to be Steam. I'm just saying they're leaving my dollars on the table, and Steam is currently getting them because they're working for them.
I always wonder what these kinds of things do to your SSD life... I probably won't use it but it's a hype feature for the platform and people are going to love it if it works well.
I always wonder what these kinds of things do to your SSD life...
I probably won't use it but it's a hype feature for the platform and people are going to love it if it works well.
TechReport's SSD Lifetime Test gives some fantastic info on SSD lifetime. The image links appear to be dead, even in the wayback machine (not sure if that is my browser), but it is still useful....
Exemplary
TechReport's SSD Lifetime Test gives some fantastic info on SSD lifetime. The image links appear to be dead, even in the wayback machine (not sure if that is my browser), but it is still useful. They started to see wear levelling at 200 terabytes written (TBW). Lets use that as the absolute worst case scenario (All SSDs were useable past this threshold). The linked announcement page has a sample default bitrate giving 10.8 GB disk usage for 120 minutes of recording, or 5.4 GB/hour. This gives us 37,037 hours of recording within 200TBW, or 1,543 days, or 4.2 years of constant playing. If we assume someone plays games on average 8 hours a day, that is still 12.6 years of lifespan until the drive starts wear levelling.
The first drive to actually start giving errors lasted to 300TBW. That gives us 55,555 hours, or 2,315 days, or 6.3 years. At 8 hours per day, that is 19 years.
The longest SSD had a lifespan of 1.2PBW (Petabytes written). Using that figure, we get 222,222 hours, or 9,259 days, or 25 years. With 8 hours of gaming a day, that is 76 years. 76 years ago, the hard drive didn't exist, let alone the ssd.
These tests are on NAND up to TLC. If you have a QLC or dram-less ssd, it could be more of an issue, but I can't imagine it being a real issue.
Great info, thank you for your time. That's a better lifetime than I was intuitively expecting. I don't remember what flavor mine is, but probably some of the newer tech (Solidigm 2TB).
Great info, thank you for your time. That's a better lifetime than I was intuitively expecting.
These tests are on NAND up to TLC. If you have a QLC or dram-less ssd, it could be more of an issue, but I can't imagine it being a real issue.
I don't remember what flavor mine is, but probably some of the newer tech (Solidigm 2TB).
That one is QLC. I feel like SSD doesn't get cheaper - they just stack more layers at cost of reliablity and speed. For the speed they can mask it with using some of the free disk space as SLC...
That one is QLC.
I feel like SSD doesn't get cheaper - they just stack more layers at cost of reliablity and speed. For the speed they can mask it with using some of the free disk space as SLC cache. For reliability I look at my 5 years old drive and it only clocks 40 TBW. I suppose gamers wouldn't hit 100TBW before they change their PC.
So I just tried it, and ... it was pretty buggy. More than half the time, buttons were disabled, or didn't seem to do anything when they seemed like they should have. Because of the bugginess, it...
So I just tried it, and ... it was pretty buggy. More than half the time, buttons were disabled, or didn't seem to do anything when they seemed like they should have. Because of the bugginess, it wasn't intuitive. I couldn't see the very latest footage, only stuff older than, like, 2+ minutes ago. (I was using the "always record" mode, not the "record on demand" mode.) I'm a developer, so I give more of a chance to something than the average user, but this was essentially unusable in its current state for me (under Linux). I'll let it cook some more, and give it a try again later when I hear there are updates and fixes.
Update to my comment: I come back today, and see that I have some footage available on the "home page" of the game in my library. I went to look, and the video player and clip editor all seem to...
Update to my comment:
I come back today, and see that I have some footage available on the "home page" of the game in my library. I went to look, and the video player and clip editor all seem to function fine now for that footage. So, regarding yesterday's experience, perhaps it was just that this new feature doesn't do so well for very live/recent footage.
I'll note though, that I was watching in htop, and saw that the screen recording was taking up 2 full cores (while my game takes about 4 on average). Not sure how I feel about a 50% increase in CPU burning, but perhaps I can give this a shot again on a case by case basis, when I think I would like to catch (record) something live.
I figured this would be basic video recording built into steam, and that is a nice feature alone. But they seem to really be trying to make it better than other similar features, not just more convenient. Having player marked and game marked segments of footage is really cool!
They're genius for continuing to add value to their platform; for users and devs. It's the only reason I'm actually okay with using their launcher/service.
SteamInput, for all its faults, is one of the greatest accessibility tools of all time. Remap all the things, even for games where that is impossible otherwise.
They may be a monopoly*, but they know they can't be slipping up because there are competitors that will rise up.
Still, I do prefer to not keep all my eggs in one basket when I can help it. Too many times where other seemingly benevolent companies turned into the stuff they sought to free themselves from during founding. Gabe won't live forever.
At this point, if I was coming in fresh, and Steam didn't have all this value-add, I'd probably just end up using EGS.
There's a reason Epic is pushing it so hard, to the point with the latest patch they broke my method of launching Fortnite in Steam with a "Use ESG launcher" error: They know the Fortnite gravy train isn't forever.
But Steam has built in remote gaming capabilities, including for VR. Family sharing. Amazing Linux integration. A console controller mapper....I can use a steam controller, 2 joycons, and a PS4 controller and it * just freaking works.* Killer features which they deployed years ago knowing their dominance is a fragile one. EGS is the first one that is putting up a decent fight.
I mean, Epic could actually invest in their platform anytime they actually care to be competitive. It's shit compared to steam.
They do, but it's not in the stuff that is flashy and "high impact".
For example, they are nearly caught up with regional pricing. And I'm pretty sure they have support in some places steam doesn't. But that won't make the headlines
I mean, it's a good call on their end. Fortnite is very popular with kids who, to some extent, have not even entered puberty yet. Once they do, they will want to differentiate themselves from "children" by playing something else. It's a huge, but fleeting success.
And while I give them props for that, I think the lack of development that the epic store has seen makes me think that they aren't reacting properly to it and will keep relying on exclusives to push it. Personally I think Valve should start publishing games too. Not make them exclusive, but say that they have to release on Steam, and beyond that just focus on giving good people money to make good games. Valve has basically infinite money and could publish some real avantgarde shit of they wanted to.
Roblox has survived on new rounds of children coming in. I think Fortnite has staying power especially because they introduced a Roblox-like custom game system.
I've tried this and I find it incredibly inconvenient to have my library spread across multiple stores/accounts/launchers. So I'm more or less all-in on Steam at this point and if it goes belly up, I will resort to piracy of my existing library. I have very few moral qualms about piracy of non-indie media in general, but absolutely no qualms about pirating things I've already paid for.
I'm still that person who keeps a folder of desktop launchers for games, so the location of the games never bother me. My first instinct is usually typing a game I'm playing in a search bar anyway.
If I do need a comprehensive view, GOG Galaxy worked well enough for me. Open source, plenty of plug-ins (even with your console game accounts), clean interface.
The Xbox One had something that was basically identical to the game markers early in its lifetime. It sounded like a really good idea on paper but it ended up leading to tons of people asking why they had dozens of clips they don't care about clogging their library of game recordings. Hopefully Steam will have a more a more elegant offering.
It’s right there in the article!
Right, that's a good step in the right direction and we'll have to see how well it works in practice.
Ideally the timeline-enhanced games will provide options to players to enable/disable specific types of moments.
For example, let's say a PVP game is set to automatically record every time you complete an objective, every time you level up, and every time you get a kill. If you're someone that doesn't care about kills and only wants to record objectives you would be upset if you completed an objective in a cool way but then that was overwritten because during the rest of the match after that your timeline was flooded with clips from killing enemies or leveling up.
IIUC, the way the game integration works is just that the games will automatically attach timestamped markers to the recording, not that they will create distinct clips. After the game has ended, the user goes back into the review/clip editor tool and can jump around to those markers to clip what they actually want to separate out.
The user can also manually create those markers with a hotkey, although when I tried it out it didn't seem to show the markers in the editor.
This looks really cool. I almost never visit Twitch, but I'm looking forward to seeing clips of my friends showing up in my Steam activity feed.
It's crazy. I was just thinking about an easier way to share clips to my friends like twitch too!
This is good timing, I'm getting frustrated with geforce experience/gamebar corrupting my clips and leaving me with a useless pile of bits. I'll definitely check this out!
What amazes me is that Steam has literally no direct competition in regards of functionality, yet they keep adding some amazing stuff all the time that sets them apart from the competition even further.
For example, Steam has a client for Linux (looking at you GoG, this is costing you money literally every day). And no, I don't want to hear about workarounds, I want a Linux client.
Steam has workarounds too. No point in making a client for games that don't support it. Steam just had the revenue todo R&D on a not-emulator approach to solving the problem.
And as much as I love GOG and Linux, a Linux client won't suddenly shoot its marketshare sky high.
I understand your comment and I didn't claim that anything would skyrocket their revenue. I would prefer to purchase from GoG myself. But as long as Valve provides good support for Linux and nobody else does, the path of least resistance for casual gamers is going to be Steam. I'm just saying they're leaving my dollars on the table, and Steam is currently getting them because they're working for them.
If this is as light weight as shadow play and easy to run, its going to be a slam dunk!
I always wonder what these kinds of things do to your SSD life...
I probably won't use it but it's a hype feature for the platform and people are going to love it if it works well.
TechReport's SSD Lifetime Test gives some fantastic info on SSD lifetime. The image links appear to be dead, even in the wayback machine (not sure if that is my browser), but it is still useful. They started to see wear levelling at 200 terabytes written (TBW). Lets use that as the absolute worst case scenario (All SSDs were useable past this threshold). The linked announcement page has a sample default bitrate giving 10.8 GB disk usage for 120 minutes of recording, or 5.4 GB/hour. This gives us 37,037 hours of recording within 200TBW, or 1,543 days, or 4.2 years of constant playing. If we assume someone plays games on average 8 hours a day, that is still 12.6 years of lifespan until the drive starts wear levelling.
The first drive to actually start giving errors lasted to 300TBW. That gives us 55,555 hours, or 2,315 days, or 6.3 years. At 8 hours per day, that is 19 years.
The longest SSD had a lifespan of 1.2PBW (Petabytes written). Using that figure, we get 222,222 hours, or 9,259 days, or 25 years. With 8 hours of gaming a day, that is 76 years. 76 years ago, the hard drive didn't exist, let alone the ssd.
These tests are on NAND up to TLC. If you have a QLC or dram-less ssd, it could be more of an issue, but I can't imagine it being a real issue.
TL;DR: This isn't really anything to worry about.
Great info, thank you for your time. That's a better lifetime than I was intuitively expecting.
I don't remember what flavor mine is, but probably some of the newer tech (Solidigm 2TB).
That one is QLC.
I feel like SSD doesn't get cheaper - they just stack more layers at cost of reliablity and speed. For the speed they can mask it with using some of the free disk space as SLC cache. For reliability I look at my 5 years old drive and it only clocks 40 TBW. I suppose gamers wouldn't hit 100TBW before they change their PC.
SSDs are getting cheaper and cheaper, it's not much of a concern anymore I would say.
So I just tried it, and ... it was pretty buggy. More than half the time, buttons were disabled, or didn't seem to do anything when they seemed like they should have. Because of the bugginess, it wasn't intuitive. I couldn't see the very latest footage, only stuff older than, like, 2+ minutes ago. (I was using the "always record" mode, not the "record on demand" mode.) I'm a developer, so I give more of a chance to something than the average user, but this was essentially unusable in its current state for me (under Linux). I'll let it cook some more, and give it a try again later when I hear there are updates and fixes.
Update to my comment:
I come back today, and see that I have some footage available on the "home page" of the game in my library. I went to look, and the video player and clip editor all seem to function fine now for that footage. So, regarding yesterday's experience, perhaps it was just that this new feature doesn't do so well for very live/recent footage.
I'll note though, that I was watching in
htop, and saw that the screen recording was taking up 2 full cores (while my game takes about 4 on average). Not sure how I feel about a 50% increase in CPU burning, but perhaps I can give this a shot again on a case by case basis, when I think I would like to catch (record) something live.