Valve launches two big Steam updates, and one of them arrives at a perfect time

Steam gifting and wishlists have received big improvements in recent updates from Valve
Users can now gift games to friends and family directly via email
Wishlists now have categories and a new 'Demo Available' highlight

Valve's updates to Steam have consistently enhanced the user experience for PC gamers, and fortunately, two of its most recent additions continue that trend.

On Steam News Hub, Valve announced two major improvements to the Steam gifting system and wishlists: users can now gift games to friends and family via guest checkout, without being limited to digital gift cards and hardware purchases, and gift games via email.

As for wishlists: categories are now available, with options to filter the wishlist via category name, a new 'Demo Available' highlight once a demo becomes available, and share a link to a specific category or filtered view of a wishlist, ultimately allowing users to sort further and organize wishlisted titles.

Both updates have made wishlisting and gifting much easier, especially since the latter now has cross-region gifting. Essentially, in a scenario where a friend is in a higher-priced region, Steam will 'calculate the cost in your friend's region' at checkout – but it's important to note that this must be a friend for this type of gift to work.

Most importantly, the improvements made to Steam wishlists should come in handy for future purposes beyond 2026, but also arrive at the ideal time considering the very busy game release schedule this year.

Not only do gamers have plenty of triple-A titles to look forward to on Steam (notably in September), with the likes of The Blood of Dawnwalker, Onimusha: Way of the Sword, and Control Resonant all in the same month, but numerous indie games are arriving too, like Blackwood.

The demo highlight is a necessary update as well, since there are a significant number of games that either launch in early access or have been in development for years with long-running demo requests (i.e., Spine).

Updates as such are great for SteamOS PCs, especially the Steam Machine, and the more improvements made for each feature on the Steam client, the better.

Isaiah is a Staff Writer for the Computing channel at TechRadar. He's spent over two years writing about all things tech, specifically games on PC, consoles, and handhelds. He started off at GameRant in 2022 after graduating from Birmingham City University in the same year, before writing at PC Guide which included work on deals articles, reviews, and news on PC products such as GPUs, CPUs, monitors, and more. He spends most of his time finding out about the exciting new features of upcoming GPUs, and is passionate about new game releases on PC, hoping that the ports aren't a complete mess.