Over the years, we have received requests to publish OBS on Steam as it provides a convenient way to install and update software. For many users, it is one of their primary sources for the programs on their machines.

In general, we want to offer OBS through various platforms to reach both our current and future users as easily as possible. This includes our presence on the Microsoft Store for Windows and our most recent expansion to Flathub on Linux. Steam is part of this endeavor.

The OBS Studio Steam version is and always will be free, just like on our website.

We may explore using the Steam platform to provide additional ways of financially supporting OBS development in the future, but the application itself will remain free and we will never charge for or paywall features.

If you are interested in finanically supporting the OBS Project, check out our Contribute page.

OBS Studio on Steam is the exact same version as you would download from our website.

OBS on Steam supports macOS 10.15 or higher as well as Windows 10 or higher (64-bit only).

Linux is currently not supported (see "Will there be a Linux version?" section below).

Steam cloud saves are not supported.

We experimented with enabling Steam Auto-Cloud but ran into several issues and limitations, such as assets not being included and cross-platform sync deleting files it shouldn't or getting stuck on conflicts, which made them unreliable and potentially confusing to users.

However, we are working on building better ways of exporting/importing and backing up your OBS data regardless of platform. Stay tuned!

No. Due to OBS Studio being licensed under the GPL, we are not able to utilize the Steamworks SDK to offer such features.

Plugins can be installed and used as normal.

Most plugin installers should automatically use the Steam library installation path. For manual installs, the OBS installation folder can quickly be located by right-clicking OBS Studio in your Steam library and selecting "Manage" -> "Browse local files".

Note that plugins cannot be distributed via Steam Workshop due OBS's GPL license (see above).

Currently we have no concrete plans for providing a Linux build on Steam.

While for Windows and macOS we can simply reuse our existing builds, Linux would require a different build that is separate from our Ubuntu PPA or Flatpak efforts. While we will look into the feasibility of providing such a version, we are already pretty busy as-is and will be focusing on Flatpak as well as general OBS-on-Linux development for the time being.

We recommend that Linux users use our Flatpak for a well supported, first-party OBS experience on a large variety of distros: https://flathub.org/apps/details/com.obsproject.Studio