Gifting and Wishlists Get a Major Tune-Up on Steam This Week

While I've got no shortage of critique for Valve and Steam in general (I have loud thoughts about their 30% cut), I cannot deny that they're one of the few digital games storefronts that consistently improve over time. Yesterday evening, Steam rolled out a new round of features for their gifting and wishlist systems, making it easier than ever to organize what you want to buy or send gifts to people around the world.

On the wishlist side of things, you can see the full change notes here, but the simple summary is that they've added a custom tag categorization system that you can use to sort and filter the things you want. Now, this might not sound like much, but as someone with literally THOUSANDS of games on my wishlist... okay, that's too daunting a task to even start on right now, but I'm sure it'll be useful eventually. It's also easier to share your wishlist with friends, so they can buy stuff off it for you via the new 'buy as gift' buttons.

And that dovetails neatly into the more significant of the improvements, which are detailed in full here. Steam Gifting is one of the areas that has actually gotten worse over time, with it becoming more difficult to gift items to friends who live in regions with different pricing. If it would potentially save them money to get a game gifted, you'd be prevented from doing so. Now you'll be asked if you're willing to pay the higher of the two regional prices when you gift, although you can only do this when the recipient is on your Steam friends list. Still not ideal or saving anyone any money, but at least you can gift internationally again.

But more immediately useful is the ability to gift stuff to people if all you have is their email address or haven't got them on your Steam friends list yet. You'll need to both be in the same region for this to work, but you can now send gifts via email. If not redeemed within 30 days, the item is automatically returned and refunded, so no huge worries if you made a typo.

Neither of these is an especially massive change, but they make the process of buying games for others (or keeping track of an absurdly packed release calendar) a little easier, which is more than I can say for most of Steam's competitors, and I'd really like to see them catch up.