Well, I must say I certainly wasn’t expecting this one to pop up in my Facebook news feed on an otherwise boring afternoon. Apparently, according to several outlets (including PC Gamer), the immensely popular, open-source game recording and live streaming software known as OBS Studio is now available as a free download on Valve’s venerable digital distribution platform as of Monday, March 21st, 2022.

According to that article from PC Gamer I just mentioned, the Steam version of OBS Studio works identically to the standalone version. Users can install plugins in the exact same way, for example, and this new appearance of the software “appears to carry over all your settings if you already have the standalone version installed on your PC.” However, there’s apparently a frequently-asked-questions article published by the OBS Project which states that this version of OBS will not sync your settings with the Steam Cloud.

PC Gamer goes on to speculate that some portion of OBS Studio’s user base may well find that updating the program automatically via their Steam library is simpler and more convenient than having to update it manually each time a new version or revision goes live. Since I use OBS Studio frequently myself to produce content for our YouTube channel, I can certainly see the foundation of that argument.

I’ve personally never had any issues with the program or its updates over the several years I’ve used it (at least none that weren’t my fault), but I could be in the minority there. I feel I should also mention that according to PC Gamer’s report if you elect to install OBS Studio via Steam, you can still run both it and whichever game you intend to tell it to capture simultaneously since Steam doesn’t implement any limits on that sort of thing.

As a potentially interesting side note to close out this report, OBS Studio’s appearance on Steam isn’t the first time noteworthy software that would otherwise remain standalone has been made available on the platform. For example, the free emulation software known as Retroarch has also called Steam a secondary home of sorts for quite some time. Even so, I suspect OBS may be among the most prominent and most useful freeware to appear on Valve’s storefront to date.