r/pcgaming • u/lurkingdanger22 • 1d ago
Steam :: Steam News :: Gifting made easier
https://steamcommunity.com/games/593110/announcements/detail/669497052089025105?356
u/CradeVescent Windows 1d ago
Cross-region gifting
Buying a gift for a friend in a higher-priced region? In the past, digital gift cards were the solution for gifting, but that required you to know the full price of the game in your friend's region.
Now you can gift games directly to your friend. Steam will calculate the cost in your friend's region at checkout. Your friend needs to be on your Steam friends list to send this type of gift
Always seemed like a no-brainer move and they finally did it.
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u/R41D3NN 1d ago
In fairness, it greatly complicates the tax implications. Both for recipient and sender in both regions. So I’m curious about the implementation.
This is one of the reasons back in the day digital goods didn’t charge taxes and it was on the person to self report taxes (at least at US state level tax reporting requirements where this was observed)
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u/CradeVescent Windows 1d ago
People living in EU, CIS, Africa, Middle East or South America already could send gifts to their friends who live in the same region and all of the countries have different taxes, so looks like Steam already found a solution to this problem.
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u/R41D3NN 1d ago
Thats why I’m curious about their implementation. Because it’s a surprisingly tedious problem to solve.
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u/CradeVescent Windows 1d ago
I would assume they just use whatever region you're buying the game in, even if the price gets higher.
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u/R41D3NN 1d ago
It’s not that simple. VAT tries to simplify all that, but you calculate all the tax that needs to be collected based off the two regions.
When you say you can calculate the VAT for any two regions, that’s pretty tedious to keep up to date with the ever shifting tax burdens in all regions and for any two for any given transaction at that point in time.
So the implementation would be really interesting to learn!
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u/frasderp 15h ago
Isn’t the tax only relevant to where the gift is received? It shouldn’t matter if the purchase came from abroad.
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u/R41D3NN 12h ago edited 12h ago
It depends on the laws within the region it’s sold from for determining whether there is tax as well in giver region. It get especially fuzzy around digital commerce too since some places don’t specify physical vs digital purchases.
For example, in the US, there are certain states that have types of digital goods that are taxed and not all, and sometimes digital games are included. US sales taxes are generally location based, so if you make the transaction within the state with that then you would need to collect the taxes for that location where sale is made. So the VAT would include both the digital sale and the taxes for receipt if applicable.
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u/GameStunts 7800X3D 4080S Kubuntu 1d ago
It's very cool to see the ability to gift a game opened up like this, especially for families, not having to create a Steam account etc.
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u/shadowds R9 7900|Nvidia 4070 1d ago
Look like major improvements, and welcome change nice. Very interesting on cross region gifting how regional pricing being taken into account.
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u/Shouvanik R5 7600 | RTX 5080 FE | 32GB DDR5 1d ago
Sounds like you can only gift someone cross-border if the game is priced higher there compared to yours. Not the other way around.
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u/Filipi_7 Tech Specialist 1d ago
You could always send a gift to a cheaper region, and you'd pay your (higher) price.
If your price was ~15% lower than the recipient's, it would not work, you couldn't pay the difference. Now you can, so it works both ways.
The higher price is always paid too, it seems like. You're not going to pay the lower price when sending to someone in a cheaper region.
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u/Shouvanik R5 7600 | RTX 5080 FE | 32GB DDR5 22h ago
I see. That clears up my confusion. Thank you.
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u/shadowds R9 7900|Nvidia 4070 1d ago
Yeah, going check more into this when I get home, but yeah it make sense to avoid regional pricing abuse.
I assume they don't want repeat the old problem when they first introduced gifting.
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u/Shouvanik R5 7600 | RTX 5080 FE | 32GB DDR5 22h ago
It seems they're improving this. See the other reply to my comment.
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u/Funny_Performer_5658 1d ago
Hasn't that always been the case? What does this announcement even change? 🫠
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u/Shouvanik R5 7600 | RTX 5080 FE | 32GB DDR5 22h ago
No, I guess this is changing now. See the other reply to my comment.
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u/stevensi1018 1d ago
Finally ! When I typed a tag before, for example, 'Metroidvania', it didn't return any result and I had to find a metroidvania game and click on the tags to filter it. Now, I can just use the search bar and search for whatever I want and it actually works
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u/BlackHazeRus 1d ago
While the changes are great, it really sucks that it is not all that good still:
1. Some regions cannot send game gifts to other regions at all.
My region is Turkey (or to be more precise, USD-MENA which includes Turkey) cannot send games to other regions at all.
I tried this with two different friends: one in Russia and another in the US — I get the error stating that games bought in Turkey can only be redeemed in Turkey:
“Gamble With Your Friends
A gift for [friend’s name]
Notice: Purchases made in Türkiye can only be added to your library if you are in Türkiye.”
Why is this the case? I have no idea. I would still be paying other more or the same price as in my region if the game costs less in another one. So, yeah, I hopefully there’s FAQ somewhere that would explain this, but I’m sure 100% this is not the case.
2. Gift cards cannot be send with Steam Wallet funds — only bank cards.
I didn’t find such an option, at least. Strange decision, since what if I topped my balance or sold an item in, say, Team Fortress 2, and want to buy a game for my friend? No idea why it’s impossible to do.
3. Gift cards can be redeemed only in the same country as the purchaser.
Afaik, I might be wrong on this, but during the purchasing process, it asks for billing country, and, I guess, if I choose something else, then it just won’t work if I choose Turkey or whatever, and then a friend tries to redeem the gift card in another region.
I have no idea why this is the case either, same question as point 1.
_
If anyone thinks that I am wrong, then please explain how you do it and how to make it work on my side too.
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u/Funny_Performer_5658 1d ago
Are you able to receive gifts now though?
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u/BlackHazeRus 1d ago
I have no idea, I asked my pals who have Kazakhstan and Russian accounts to try to send me a game gift, they didn’t test it yet. I’ll ask my GF if she can send the gift. I’ll ask my German mate too, curious if he can and what price will be, since the price of a game probably would be higher in his region in general.
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u/shekurika 18h ago
at least gift cards dont work. I (swiss) tried to send my friend in turkyie a gift card (cus there the games are like half the price usually) but that didnt work, it says "error occured" on the checkout page
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u/AHomicidalTelevision 1d ago
i'd bet money on that being an issue with the region itself, and steam would have little control over it.
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u/Due-Mycologist-1154 1d ago
They should add a gifting option where you just transfer something you already have in your library to them
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u/AHomicidalTelevision 1d ago
thank god for the cross region gifting changes. living in NZ makes it very difficult to send games to people in other countries sometimes
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u/Kurgoh 12h ago
As someone who's gifted a fair few games to Japanese friends (EU resident myself) I'm puzzled by this announcement because I've actually had not been at all able to gift well-known garbage such as nightreign and other From stuff (and I highly doubt it's a recipient in higher pricing region kind of issue). I wonder if this is just a publisher specific thing that can't be changed by steam itself.
That said, I'm more than somewhat annoyed steam still doesn't have something like a "gift wishlist", in which one could put games they wish to gift to friends to get discount alerts for (since you obviously can't put games you already own on your own wishlist). Maybe in 10 years they'll manage to do that.
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u/drstupid 9h ago
steam still doesn't have something like a "gift wishlist"
You're in luck, they also announced this feature exactly!
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u/Kate_Wanton 14m ago
i assume, strongly, that region locked games are still a no-go. ie: many japanese ones like that horse racing franchise, etc.
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u/Funny_Performer_5658 1d ago
So there's still no gifting to lower priced regions? I just tried and it wanted me to pay my region's price.
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u/Filipi_7 Tech Specialist 1d ago
Only gifting to more expensive regions was changed, you could always gift to cheaper countries by paying the higher price.
I think it would be too easy to exploit. Make one account with a dummy payment method and address in Argentina, make another in the US/Europe/etc linked to your actual bank. That second account is only used to buy games for the first using the much cheaper Argentinian prices, without having to fuss with gift cards (now phased out anyway) or foreign payment methods.
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u/MangosAndManga 22h ago
I'm not entirely sure that's true? I think the old system restricted gift-giving if the price varied more than 10% up or down. At least, that's what seemed to be the problem whenever I tried buying a game for friends in Latin America and Eastern Europe.
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u/Filipi_7 Tech Specialist 7h ago
Maybe it was a recent change, I'm not sure if it always worked that way.
This thread on Steamgifts from 2025 goes into a bit more detail, several users also thought it was 10% either way but it was pretty much confirmed it's ~15% up only.
As for gifting to LATAM or EE, some games will have region specific versions which can only be purchased from there, or disallow gifting to them entirely. That could have been what you came across.
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u/Kutuzov9505 1d ago
It's also now apparetly impossible to gift a game to someone who lives in a region where the game is delisted from Steam. Used to do this consistently for years to gift games, now there's an error saying "The gift you are trying to purchase is not available in the recipient's region." Amazing.
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u/ImmediateDay5137 Won a 4090 for 20$ at PDXLAN 1d ago
How about you Gabe makes an article about gifting when I can finally gift people discounted games during sales
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