Buying someone else a Steam game got a lot easier today. You no longer have to be Steam friends with the person to whom you're sending a gift, and don't even need a Steam account. You can also select gifts directly from a shared wishlist.
Here are today's Steam gifting changes, in short:
- It's now possible to gift a game without having a Steam account. (Previously, guest checkout could only be used for digital gift card and hardware purchases)
- You also don't need to know the recipient's Steam account, and can gift games and digital gift cards with just an email address (even if it isn't the address associated with their Steam account)
- You can now gift games across regions. You need to know the recipient's Steam account for this, as the price you pay will be the price of the game in their region
- You can now select and purchase gifts directly from a shared wishlist
Previously, sending a gift on Steam meant asking the recipient for their Steam account name and friending them, which dampens the surprise a bit.
My only wish now is for a simple way to stuff a Steam game into a physical card for birthdays and holidays. Steam retired physical gift cards recently, citing fraud. (With these new features, you could gift a game to an email address you control, and then print out the redemption link and make the recipient type it in manually, which is slightly mean in a way that I approve of as an uncle.)
Alongside the gifting update are some new wishlist features.
The big one is the ability to organize your wishlist into categories. When you share your wishlist with someone else, you can also now share just a specific category (eg, 'Xmas list'), and as mentioned above, it's now possible to purchase gifts directly from a shared wishlist.
