Steam's gifting system expands to include one of the handiest features Valve ever added

Steam's 'Complete Your Collection' bundles are one of Valve's best innovations for its storefront. Bundles are a great way to get games, DLCs, soundtracks, and more at slightly cheaper prices than you would if you were to buy them all separately, but Complete Your Collection adjusts the contents of a bundle based on your current library so that you don't end up buying the same product twice. However, this handy feature has never been part of the gifting system - until today.

As has been spotted by the SteamDB team, Valve now lets you gift Complete Your Collection bundles to those on your Steam friends list. Whether it's cross-brand bundles of related games, to collections of all the games and expansions in a given series, you can now gift these to a pal and it'll make the Complete Your Collection calculations for you based on their owned games. That means that you'll benefit not only from whatever general discount has been applied to the bundle, but you won't have to pay for the elements your friend already owns.

Say a friend already owns the base version of an excellent single-player game, but you know they'd absolutely love the three expansions that've been released for it. Previously, you probably would've had to buy each piece of DLC individually and gift them separately. But now, you can utilize a discounted Steam bundle that wraps the base game and all its expansions together.

If you put the bundle in your basket, select the option to send it as a gift, and then pick out the pal in question from your friend list, it'll know that they already have the base game, so will turn it into a Complete Your Collection bundle. That means the price of the base game will drop off, but you'll still benefit from the discounted rate on the three pieces of DLC.

However, there does seem to be one caveat. In response to SteamDb's post about the feature, Bluesky user 'Erina' flags that this didn't initially work when they tried to gift a bundle to their friend who they knew owned one of the games included. They report that their friend had their games list set to private, so it wasn't visible to the gifter. Once the friend allowed Erina to see their library, the Complete Your Collection magic began to work.

As Steam's dominance as a storefront continues to grow, it's good to see Gabe and co. are still adding consumer-friendly elements and not resting on their laurels. Now it's time to see if I can persuade anyone to give me the Valve Complete Pack - there are some older gaps in my Valve history I'd quite like filling.