- Steam Gifts and Wishlists Have Received Big Improvements in Recent Valve Updates
- Users can now gift games to friends and family directly via email
- Wishlists now have categories and a new “Demo available” highlight
Valve’s updates to Steam have steadily improved the user experience for PC gamers, and fortunately, two of its most recent additions continue that trend.
On Steam News Hub, Valve announced two major improvements to Steam’s gifting system and wishlists: Users can now gift games to friends and family through guest checkout, not limited to digital gift cards and hardware purchases, and gift games via email.
As for wishlists: Categories are now available, with options to filter the wishlist by category name, a new ‘Demo Available’ highlight once a demo is available, and sharing a link to a specific category or a filtered view of a wishlist, ultimately allowing users to further sort and organize wishlist titles.
Both updates have made wishlist creation and gifting much easier, especially since the latter now offers cross-region gifting. Essentially, in a scenario where a friend is in a region with higher prices, Steam will “calculate the cost in your friend’s region” at checkout, but it’s important to note that this has to be a friend to make this type of gift work.
Most importantly, the improvements made to Steam wishlists should be useful for future purposes beyond 2026, but also arrive at the ideal time considering this year’s very busy game release schedule.
Not only do gamers have plenty of triple-A titles to look forward to on Steam (especially in September), such as Dawnwalker’s Blood, Onimusha: Way of the Swordand Resonant control all in the same month, but numerous independent games are also arriving, such as black wood.
The featured demo is also a necessary update, as there are a significant number of games that are releasing in early access or have been in development for years with long-running demo requests (i.e. Backbone).
Updates as such are great for SteamOS PCs, especially the Steam Machine, and the more improvements made to each feature in the Steam client, the better.
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