Steam As We Know It Has Just Changed Forever

Steam as a platform has remained the dominant force in the PC gaming world for decades, with much of its favor coming from a monumental number of features and built-in quality-of-life features that blow the competition out of the water. Even putting aside the dozens of free games the platform offers on a frequent basis, Steam's current ease of use is easily its best feature. Despite how ingrained Steam is for PC gamers everywhere, the platform has still faced more than its fair share of criticism over a few outdated functionalities. Thankfully, the platform just received one of the changes that completely changes how you use the app moving forward, which is thanks to two major back-to-back updates that massively overhaul two aspects of the user experience. After years of complaints by players frustrated by the platform's restrictive gifting functionality, Steam has officially given the process a complete facelift as a part of its first major update, which doesn't even require you to have a Steam account, let alone be digital friends already, in order to gift someone a game. On top of making the process drastically easier for non-gamers that want to offer digital gifts to friends or family without making an account, or even offer it through an email if you are struggling to or worried about giving away the surprise by asking someone for their Steam username, you can also now purchase games directly from someone's wishlist without jumping through any additional hoops. While these features are already more than we could have asked for to help simplify the gifting process, Steam has most importantly finally changed how buying gifts for friends overseas works by completely removing the platform's cross-regional gifting restrictions. With Steam using the higher-priced currency as the benchmark for the game's cost, you can now gift someone a Steam game anywhere in the world regardless of the difference in currency, rather than relying on the limitations of digital gift cards. If these updates that remove the biggest barriers to Steam gifting weren't already music to your ears, you might be more interested in the second major overhaul that went live recently regarding how Steam Wish lists function. Rather than just having one long list of games you're interested in with little in the way of differentiating them aside from a simple ranked order, Steam is also adding custom categories to the lists. Functioning similarly to how custom categories already work in Steam libraries, you can create any category you want that can then be used to create subsections and easily searchable tags within your ever-growing list, as well as quickly add your most recent tags to any games you add in the future. Adding to Steam's gifting update, you'll also be able to provide a shareable Wishlist link that will only show the games that are currently selected based on your tags, allowing you to make your own curated selection of games that you can share with friends or family, rather than having someone pick out a random game that you completely forgot was even on your radar at some point. Even though these updates won't affect every player to the same degree, its just another addition to the long list of features and reasons why Steam continues to dominate the PC market, especially when combined with platform's recent stance on refusing to support Steam-exclusive releases.