Over the years, Steam has released hundreds, if not thousands, of updates to its client and various platforms, with many flying under the radar even if they should have had more fanfare. Some of these features might be ones you’d come to expect from modern gaming platforms, while others are neat concepts that you might not have considered needing while gaming.
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While there are plenty of features that you might use every day, some of these might have flown under the radar. So load up your Steam Deck and check out these features to ensure you’re getting the most out of your gaming time.
4
Steam Families
Original release: March 2024
Do you have around five friends and/or family members lying around with Steam accounts who all want to play games? Well, you’re in luck since the Steam Families feature is fully up and running as of late 2024.
First released to Steam Beta in March 2024, the system works by inviting users to a special kind of group, which grants each person access to a shared library of games. People in the group can have their own save files and earn achievements for their own accounts, so there’s no need to worry about saving over anyone’s files or losing out on progress.
While you will still need multiple copies of a game to have people playing the same game simultaneously, any number of players can access games from the library if they’re all playing different games. There are a ton of security features and family restrictions to ensure that younger players can’t access games of your choice, and your family members don’t have to be in the same house to play games, making it a great pick for any family.
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Game Recording Beta
Original release: June 2024
Whether you are a streamer, content creator, or just looking to save some of your coolest moments to share with friends, the Game Recording Beta feature is a cool tool for automatically saving your gameplay with little to no fuss.
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The highlight feature here is the Background Recording mode, which, after you set up, can start recording your gameplay as soon as you boot up a game. Background Recording will capture your last 120 minutes of video, and even better, you can manually drop markers for reference points, reminding you when you do cool things. Certain games have this feature built in, so it will automatically tag your highlights. It can eat up a lot of storage space, so just be aware before you start using this feature too much.
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In-Game Overlay
Original release: April 2023
The in-game overlay feature allows you to do a ton while gaming, from opening and pinning apps to chatting with friends and even watching entire movies or shows. While distracting for some, the feature is perhaps the most versatile of all the features to make it out of Steam Beta.
The main use for the overlay system is the ability to open up a browser and look up a guide or tutorial video for a quest, which is incredibly helpful when you’re in the middle of a game and don’t want to exit to look something up, or don’t want to switch to your phone and get distracted by a notification or three.
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The main feature here is a toolbar that lets you manage your windows and even have it save which windows you want open across games. It does everything from tracking achievements to finding news pieces for your current game, making it a bit of a catch-all addition to your Steam Deck.
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Steam Notes
Original release: April 2023
Part of the in-game overlay feature, but so useful that it deserves its own shout-out, the Steam Notes feature is a little note-taking system that can sit over your game and can serve as a bit of a personal quest log for yourself while you’re playing games.
Most useful for larger RPGs like Elden Ring or Skyrim, the notes system helps you keep track of things in games like quests, item drop locations, or places you need to return to when your in-game maps are lacking.
Let’s say you’re running through Caelid trying to grind out levels at the Bestial Sanctum in Elden Ring. Maybe you come across a cave or meet one of the roaming bosses like Decaying Ekzykes, a massive zombified dragon filled to the brim with scarlet rot. You can pull up the Steam Notes to jot down its location, maybe add a marker to your map, and then take a screenshot of that location and upload it to the Notes feature so you never lose it or forget why you put a marker at that spot.
Upgrading your gaming is pretty easy, as it turns out
If these features seem neat and you want to explore more of what Steam Beta has to offer, you can turn on these features by heading to your Steam Client and clicking on the ‘Steam’ menu on the upper left part of the menu bar. From there, you just need to navigate to the ‘Settings’ menu, and under the interface tab, find the section labeled ‘Client Beta Participation’. Voila! You have access to all these features and more!
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source: https://www.xda-developers.com/features-steam-beta-first-that-you-missed/
