Valve has rolled out updates to Steam's gifting and wishlist features, adding email-based game gifting, guest checkout for buyers without a Steam account, and user-organized wishlist categories. The changes were detailed on July 22, 2026, via Engadget.

The most notable gifting change lets users send a game directly through email. The recipient gets a link to claim it, and the sender does not need a Steam account to complete the purchase. Previously, gifting required knowing the recipient's Steam account handle. The email method removes that obstacle, but with a geographic catch: sender and recipient must be in the same country.

For cross-border gifting, the older system still applies. The sender must be Steam friends with the recipient, and Steam calculates the cost in the recipient's regional currency at checkout. Valve has long blocked gifting between countries where regional pricing differs sharply, notifying the buyer before purchase per a Steam community announcement. That policy remains in effect for the friends-based route.

There is a built-in expiration window. If a game sent via email is not claimed within 30 days, the purchase is automatically refunded to the sender. Steam's inventory system also includes a "Pending Gifts" tab, a feature originally introduced in 2011, where users can see both gifts offered to them and gifts they have sent to friends.

On the wishlist side, Steam now supports user-created categories, working like folders or tags. Users can add games to a category from the store page or from an existing wishlist, and selecting one filters the view to just those titles. Sale notifications can be toggled per category, so a user could set up alerts for a shortlist of must-buy games while silencing everything else.

Steam also now generates shareable links to a full wishlist or to a specific category, and wishlist entries show whether a game has a demo available. Hovering over a wishlisted game plays its trailer inline.

The guest checkout expansion is notable for its scope. Previously, guest checkout on Steam was limited to gift cards and Steam hardware. Extending it to full game purchases removes the account-creation barrier for buyers who are purchasing a gift for someone else and have no intention of using the platform themselves.

Taken together, the updates target friction at both ends of the transaction: the sender who does not want to navigate Steam's social features, and the wishlist user managing dozens of saved titles across seasonal sales. The per-category notification toggle in particular addresses a long-standing complaint among heavy wishlist users, who previously had to either accept alert noise for every saved game or disable notifications entirely.

The broader context here is about Steam's regional pricing model, which charges different prices for the same game depending on the country. That system is designed to keep games affordable in markets with lower purchasing power, but it also creates an incentive for someone in a high-price region to buy games through a lower-price region. Requiring same-country delivery for email gifting is a predictable guardrail against that kind of arbitrage. The trade-off is that the feature works cleanly for domestic gifts but cannot replace the friends-based system for international exchanges, which narrows its utility for the globally distributed user base that PC gaming increasingly serves.