Valve has announced an array of additions to Steam wishlists, including categories to best organize lists, as well as substantial revamps to how gifting works.

Announced yesterday, Valve says the revamp to wishlists comes after requests from Steam users to have more ways to manage their lists. Now, users can create custom categories to filter games. The example shown on the announcement post includes ideas such as "old school remakes," "buy when on sale," "wait for reviews," and more.

It's also possible to customize wishlist notifications to only be sent for certain categories. The notifications happen when a game goes on sale, it moves from Early Access to full release, or a demo becomes available for it.

Valve says it has also improved the search experience on the wishlist page, enabling autocomplete for faster results, and games now have a specific label to quickly signalize whenever there's a demo available.

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Moreover, while it is already possible to share a link to a wishlist, users can now do so for specific categories or a filtered view of the list. Valve shared an example of a user creating a specific list that someone may want to send to their family when asking for birthday presents.

Steam enables cross-region gifting and guest purchases

Steam wishlists aren't the only feature receiving a revamp this week. As a double announcement from Valve, gifting has just gotten multiple improvements as well, starting with cross-region gifts.

For years, if a user attempted to purchase a game for a friend in a higher-priced region, the only official method was to buy a digital gift card that matched the price. Now, Steam automatically calculates the cost of the recipient's region at checkout, allowing to purchase the gift directly from the giftee's wishlist.

Game Developer tested this feature from Argetina, with this author going into a friend's wishlist and testing the cost of gifting Final Fantasy XIII. The game costs $12.99 in my region (before taxes). When clicking on a "purchase as gift" button in Steam, a small window appeared that declared "the price of this item has changed" and displayed a new $15.99 pricetag.

Valve has also made two major changes to the "guest checkout" process, which lets Steam users make purchase without an account. Guest checkout was previously limited to digital gift cards and hardware purchases. That has now been extended to games. Customers using guest checkout can now also buy gifts that can be sent via email. When using this method, the email will include a link to let the recipient sign in to their account and accept the gift.

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About the Author

Diego Argüello

Contributing Editor, News, GameDeveloper.com

Diego Nicolás Argüello is a freelance journalist and critic from Argentina. Video games helped him to learn English, so now he covers them for places like The New York Times, NPR, Rolling Stone, and more. He also runs Into the Spine, a site dedicated to fostering and supporting new writers, and co-hosted Turnabout Breakdown, a podcast about the Ace Attorney series. He’s most likely playing a rhythm game as you read this.