- Steam gifts and wishlists have received major improvements in the latest updates from Valve
- 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 latest additions continue that trend.
On the Steam News Hub, Valve announced two major improvements to Steam’s gifting system and wishlists: users can now gift games to friends and family via the Guest Box, without being limited to digital gift cards and hardware purchases, and gifting games via email.
Regarding wishlists: categories are now available, with options to filter the wishlist by category name, a new “Demo available” highlight when a demo becomes available, and share a link to a specific category or filtered view of a wishlist, ultimately allowing users to further sort and organize titles on the wishlist.
Both updates have made wish lists and gifts much easier, especially since the latter now has cross-region gifting. Essentially, in a scenario where a friend is in a more expensive region, Steam will ‘calculate the cost in your friend’s region’ at checkout – but it’s important to note that this bowl be a friend for this type of gift to work.
Most importantly, the improvements made to Steam wishlists should be useful for future purposes beyond 2026, but also come at the ideal time given the very 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), with e.g. The Blood of Dawnwalker, Onimusha: Path of the Swordand Control resonance all in the same month, but there are also several indie games coming, e.g Blackwood.
The demo highlight is also a necessary update, as there are a significant number of games that either launch in early access or have been in development for years with lengthy demo requests (ie. Backbone).
Updates as such are good for SteamOS PCs, especially the Steam Machine, and the more improvements made to each feature of the Steam client, the better.
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