Valve has recently announced a major improvement for the Steam digital storefront.
As of now, Steam has new and improved features to help PC gamers send digital gift cards and games to their friends and family with greater ease, and we've got the patch notes on how they will work.
Guest checkout
First off, the patch notes on Steam describe changes to the guest checkout system. Before, it allowed family members or friends to make gifts without needing a Steam account, but it was limited to digital gift cards and hardware.
Now, it's been updated so people can buy and gift any game on Steam. You just send a wishlist share to a friend or family member, and they buy gifts directly from the wishlist without needing to make a Steam account on their end.
If a guest user wants to send a surprise gift, they can send it to any email address instead.
Gift to email
Next up, we have the new gifting via email feature, which allows players to send digital gift cards and games directly to a recipient's email account in case they don't know their Steam account.
Additionally, if the recipient's email address is linked to their Steam account, the email they'll receive will include a link to sign into their account and accept a player's gift.
However, any gift email not accepted within 30 days of being sent will automatically be refunded, so it can't be scheduled for future delivery, plus the recipient of the gift must live in the same country as the gift purchaser.
Cross-region gifting
Next we have improvements for cross-region gifting. Previously you couldn't buy Steam games for friends and family overseas on Steam, and you had to send digital gift cards to get around that, while also doing research on how much games cost in different regions due to currency conversion.
However, this update will now allow you to gift games directly to people so long as they're on your Steam friends list, while Steam automatically calculates how much a game you're sending to a person in a different region will cost during checkout.
Direct from wishlist
Finally, Steam has implemented improvements for its wishlist share link feature.
With this, you can send digital gift cards or gift games directly from a person's wishlist without needing to be friends with them on Steam. You can also create a shared wishlist that's been filtered to specific games.
Additionally, when a friend or family member clicks on your shared wishlist link, if they decide to buy you a game, the gift recipient in the cart during checkout will be automatically filled with your information.
As a reminder, friends and family members can checkout as guest users without needing a Steam.
Windows Central's take
These new changes sound really cool, but the change I'm liking most is being able to directly buy games for my friends overseas without needing to guess how much it will cost due to regional currency conversions.
This is more than I can say for Xbox, because, as of right now, you can only gift games on the Xbox ecosystem to people who live in the same region as you. Which is really inconvenient for me as I have family overseas who I would love to send Xbox games to but can't.
So I hope that Microsoft takes notes from Steam and copies this update so I can more easily buy Xbox games for my family overseas for Christmas and birthdays without having to use circumventing tactics like sending gift cards.
What do you think? Do these improvements to sending gifts on Steam sound cool? Would you like to see Xbox copy this update?
If you have any thoughts on the matter, please let us know in the comments, on Reddit, or in the poll.
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