Valve has updated Steam with new ways to gift games and manage wishlists. You can now send a game through email, buy one without creating a Steam account, and sort your wishlist into categories. The changes were announced on July 22, 2026, via Engadget.

The biggest gifting change is that you can now send a game directly to someone's email. The recipient gets a link to claim the game, and you do not need a Steam account to buy it. Before this, you had to know the person's Steam account to send them a gift. The email method removes that hurdle, but there is a catch: both the sender and the recipient must live in the same country.

For sending games to someone in another country, the old rules still apply. You need to be Steam friends with the recipient, and Steam calculates the price based on where they live. Valve has long blocked gifting between countries when the price difference is large, warning the buyer before they pay, per a Steam community announcement. That rule still holds for the friends-based method.

If a game sent by email is not claimed within 30 days, the sender gets an automatic refund. Steam also has a "Pending Gifts" tab, introduced in 2011, where you can see gifts you have received and gifts you have sent.

For wishlists, Steam now lets you create categories, similar to folders on your computer. You can add a game to a category from the store page or from your existing wishlist, and clicking a category shows only those games. You can turn sale alerts on or off for each category, so you could get notifications for a small list of games you definitely want to buy while ignoring the rest.

Steam can now also create a shareable link to your whole wishlist or to a specific category. Wishlist entries show whether a game has a demo available, and hovering over a game plays its trailer right there.

The guest checkout change is also broader than before. Previously, you could only use guest checkout for gift cards and Steam hardware. Now you can buy full games without creating an account, which helps someone who just wants to buy a gift and has no plans to use Steam themselves.

The updates focus on removing friction for both the gift sender and the wishlist user. The per-category notification toggle is especially useful for people with long wishlists, who previously had to either get alerts for every saved game or turn off notifications completely.

In my view, the one real limitation is the same-country rule for email gifting. Steam charges different prices for the same game depending on the country, a system meant to keep games affordable where incomes are lower. But that also means someone in an expensive region could try to buy games through a cheaper one. The same-country requirement is an understandable way to prevent that. The trade-off is that email gifting works well for gifts within your own country but cannot replace the friends-based system for international exchanges, which limits its usefulness for the increasingly global PC gaming community.