- Steam Gifts and Wishlists 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 consistently improved the user experience for PC gamers, and thankfully two of its most recent additions continue that trend.
On Steam News Hub, Valve announced two major improvements to the Steam Gifting system and Wishlists: Users can now gift games to friends and family via 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 via category name, a new “Demo Available” highlight once a demo becomes available, and to share 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 made wishlists and gifting much easier, especially since the latter now offers cross-regional 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 must be a friend to make this type of gift work.
More importantly, the improvements to Steam Wishlists should be useful for future goals beyond 2026, but they will also come at the perfect time given the busy game release schedule this year.
Not only do gamers have plenty of triple-A titles to look forward to on Steam (especially in September), including Blood of Dawnwalker, Onimusha: Way of the SwordAnd Resonant control all in the same month, but many indie games are coming too, like Black wood.
The demo highlight is also a necessary update, as there are a significant number of games either launched in Early Access or have been in development for years with long-running demo requests (i.e. Spine).
Updates as such are great for SteamOS PCs, especially the Steam Machine, and the more improvements to each Steam client feature, the better.
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