Valve just made gifting games on Steam a whole lot easier

Published Jul 23, 2026, 2:50 PM EDT Patrick O'Rourke is XDA's News Editor and Entertainment Segment Lead. Previously, he was Pocket-lint's Editor-in-Chief, the Editor-in-Chief of Canadian tech publication MobileSyrup, and earlier in his career, he worked as the technology editor at the Financial Post and Postmedia. He's based in Toronto. Over the past 15 years, he's written thousands of articles. Patrick has also interviewed dozens of tech industry executives and covered GDC, E3, Gamescom, WWDC, Apple keynotes, Samsung Unpacked events and more. Patrick has a BA in journalism from Toronto Metropolitan University. Sign in to your XDA account Summary Guest checkout now lets anyone buy and gift Steam games without an account. Wishlists can be filtered and shared by category or demo availability for easier gifting. Digital gifts can be emailed; unaccepted gifts auto-refund after 30 days and support cross-region buys. In a recent post on its News Hub, Valve revealed two notable new Steam features. First off, users can now gift games to friends and family directly through guest checkout. Previously, guest checkout (which launched back in 2024) was limited to digital gift cards and hardware purchases. Now, guest checkout can be used on any game on Steam. You can even send a wishlist link to a friend or family member on Steam, allowing whoever might be sending you a gift to purchase directly from that list without needing a Steam account. This makes gifting games on Steam even more straightforward, especially for anyone not familiar with the platform. I can see this coming in handy if you're sending video game gift ideas over to a friend or family member. The second new Steam feature is that Wishlists can now be filtered by category name and whether a demo is available. Additionally, you can now send a link to a specific category or filtered view of your wishlist. Steam game gifts can also be sent via email This is useful if you don't know the receiver's Steam username Credit: Valve Valve says that digital gift cards and games can now be sent directly to an email account, which is useful if you don't know the Steam account of the person you're trying to send a gift to. A link appears in the recipient's inbox, and they can then sign in to their account and accept the gift. Any gift that hasn't been accepted within 30 days is automatically refunded, according to Valve. Gifts can be sent cross-region, but you'll need to purchase the title at the full price of the game in your friend's or family member's country (the cost in your friend's region is calculated at checkout). In other Valve-related news, recent Steam Deck price hikes reportedly wiped out 82 percent of Steam Deck sales, with the handheld only selling 15,000 units a week, according to data pulled by Boiling Steam.