Steam’s digital storefront has just made owning digital copies easier thanks to some very convenient ways to gift games, hardware, and gift cards to your friends and family.
First on the list is guest checkout, which allows you to buy games without a Steam account, with its previous iterations limited to hardware and gift cards. Well, picking up a copy of a game from your friend’s wishlist is now seamless, with the option to share lists now on the table. If it’s meant to be a surprise, all you need is the recipient’s email, and the resulting email will have all they need to log into their account and redeem the present. You need to ensure that their account is in the same country of purchase, and that they redeem it within 30 days before it automatically gets refunded to you.
Interestingly, you can now gift games directly to your friends across regions, with Steam calculating the final cost at checkout and saving you the hassle of calculating how many gift cards you needed to cover the price of a game. The recipient needs to be on your friends list, though, so keep that in mind. The announcement rounds out the new additions with expanded wishlist functionality that’s removed the requirement for you to be friends with a recipient to gift someone a game, and the ability to create specific, filtered wishlists that link to share with your family and friends. Anyone sending you a gift gets your details auto-populated in the checkout cart.
All in all, gifting games is definitely going to be more seamless if Steam is your go-to digital storefront. It’s interesting that these changes have come about at a time when there are a lot of conversations around games ownership, but that’s a subject for another conversation.
