It now must be done at the time of purchase.
Does this blog entry even mention that? It covers a bunch of other stuff. Are they burying the lede intentionally?
Steam Gifting will now be a system of direct exchange from gift buyer to gift receiver, and we will be retiring the Gift to E-mail and Gift to Inventory options.
Sad , I liked storing games in my inventory to gift at a later time. :(
Honestly, I didn’t even know that was possible. I thought this was the way it always worked.
This will pretty much kill sites like kinguin.
Sounds like a company is scared of credit card frauds bans. I don’t see what they have to win from this move.
They’re certainly stating it in the most weaselly PR way possible.
Me too. Mostly because I wasn’t always sure who I would give it to at the time I bought it, but I knew it was a great game and someone out there must not have it yet.
I can only imagine the targets are third-party sites. Seems nutty to me, otherwise.
I’m guessing you guys are in the minority on using inventory purchases as intended - Valve can definitely see the usage statistics on that, and clearly decided legitimate use of the system was being outweighed by enough shady stuff to need to make a change.
My take: Remember when Valve changed the gifting system with regards to VAC- or “Game Ban”-enabled games a while back? They disabled inventory purchasing for those games, and tied gifting to bans - if you or someone you gifted a game to got banned, you had your gifting privileges for that game revoked. This new change just extends that to everything else on Steam - no need to distinguish on a purchase page whether or not something is eligible for inventory purchase, and this now hits games that don’t use Valve’s regular ban systems for whatever reason, particularly those with Steam Workshop support.
I sincerely doubt abuse was that rampant (don’t get me wrong - it was there, but the majority of people? No). Rather, Valve simply determined the benefits outweighed the costs.
Fuck Kinguin.
Maybe so. What about 4 or multi packs. Sometimes I buy a 4 pack only for three people… the fourth goes into my inventory for later. I am unclear if this is affected by that… i mean I direct send 2 as a gift, keep one for myself of course.
Me three. I used to buy all my games as inventory gifts. I’d activate them when I wanted to play or give them away if the backlog said I’d never get around to it. This change makes those coupons a little less attractive.
One of the F2P games I used to play had a big, fun trading market. People would farm dungeons for ingame energy currency and trade it for Steam gifts.
I could easily see 51% or more of inventory gift purchases being for Workshop ban evasion, trading and selling on third-party sites, credit card fraud, and other things Valve would want to stop.
I didn’t even know buying games and storing in your inventory was a thing.
Another key part of this announcement, about removing the “send gift to email” function, seems significantly less controversial, judging from the almost nonexistent volume of comments complaining about it on that Steam announcement page.
I imagine it’s pretty tough in 2017 to come up with a story that begins with “I need to send a Steam gift to someone who isn’t on my Steam friends list” and ends in any way other than “I added them to my Steam friends list” or “I had my e-kidney stolen by someone in Russia.”
Oh, dang, I actually missed that initially. Since I don’t really play games, much less play games with other people, there are people in my life I know are gamers that I’ve never bothered to friend on Steam. I’ve definitely emailed gifts in the last year due to that.
I’m not so sure.
The selling of actual “Steam gifts” are only a tiny portion of grey-market sites. Most transactions are still keys procured in fashions other than Steam gifts.
Though, to your point, this might be the first step in a larger move to impact the grey-market; with other measures introduced later (i.e. key redemption caps).
I’ve used this feature a few times. It required/forced you & the giftee to become Steam friends.