Steam wishlists and gifting games just got a whole lot more useful

Ken coolly serves the hottest news stories and has played, we think, every game ever made.

The Steam wishlist is one of the most useful features on the Valve store, allowing you to quickly track everything from the biggest upcoming PC games you're interested in to those 'maybes' that you're waiting for the right sale on. Starting right now, it's just been made a whole lot more flexible - and this new Steam update also ties in a redesign to the way you gift games, providing even more ways to send a treat to your friends or family (or give them the chance to buy you one instead).

"With so many amazing games on Steam, players are wishlisting more and more titles," Valve explains. "Existing options like ranking and filtering are great, but players have asked for even more ways to manage their Steam wishlists." Enter wishlist categories. These completely customizable tags can be stuck onto games with the simple click of a button, and you're free to name them whatever takes your fancy.

Whether it's a 'buy day one,' a 'wait for sale,' or even a 'watching early access,' you'll be able to apply any you've previously used to any other games on your wishlist. You can then filter down to a specific category with tabs at the top of the list. The ones you use most will appear in the 'Add to Wishlist' dropdown menu on game store pages, letting you immediately add them when you save something new. You can also customize wishlist notifications to only apply for specific categories.

That's not the end; Valve has polished up wishlists more generally. The search has been upgraded, including the addition of autocomplete. Games with demos available are now marked on your wishlist, and there's an option to be notified when a new demo is released. There are 'microtrailers' that play when you hover over a game's image in your wishlist, and the browsing process more generally should do "a better job of bringing you back to what you were looking at" when you jump between pages.

While you could already share your wishlist with people, there's now the option to share a specific category from your wishlist using a custom URL. Doing so will let anyone you send the link to view that set, even if the rest of your wishlist is set to private, so it's an ideal way to send out a curated birthday wishlist. Once your need for it has passed, you can revoke the link to stop it being used in the future.

These are some excellent inclusions, but what if your friends and family don't use Steam? Here's where the improvements to Steam gifting come in. Guest checkout, previously only available for digital gift cards and hardware, will now let people gift any game on Steam without requiring an account. If someone uses your shared wishlist link, they can click 'Purchase as a gift' directly from that page to auto-fill all the necessary information, with no requirement to have a Steam account or to be friends with you on Steam.

Valve has also introduced email gifts. If you want to send someone a Steam game but don't know their account (and don't want to spoil the surprise by asking), you can choose to send a gift purchase directly to an email address. There are some slight restrictions in place here: gifts via email will be automatically refunded if not accepted in 30 days, cannot be scheduled for a future delivery, and must be for someone who lives in your region.

Speaking of regions, there's one final benefit for gifting to your pals across the globe. Cross-region gifting has now been enabled, with Steam calculating the correct cost of the game for the location your friend is in. That might mean you pay more than you would for your own copy - but previously such gifts weren't possible at all, so consider this a step up. In order to use this particular feature, you will need to be Steam friends with the recipient.

There is something inherently funny about celebrating 'store owner introduces new ways for you to give them money,' but these are ultimately very welcome usability improvements for a storefront most of us were using anyway. The wishlist upgrades are also a huge boon; my personal collection sits at a whopping 330 games, and while I could probably trim some outdated additions off that number, being able to sort them out by the factor that would ultimately get me to click 'buy' on each one is a great change.