Valve has made drastic changes to Steam Gifting, and the alterations will make it difficult for code resellers that were profiting from price differences between regions.
Code resellers usually purchase codes in bulk during Steam major sales and then resell them at base price after the promotion period is over. With the ‘Gift to E-Mail’ option, reseller did not have to be friends with the buyer and could just send the gift to other Steam users.
[quote style=’1′ cite=” title=”]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.[/quote]
The advantage of the new feature is that you can purchase a gift and schedule the gift for later. If the recipient decided not to accept the gifts, or already own that game in their library, the game will be returned to Steam and the sender will automatically get a refund.
Cross-country gifting will be an issue if there is a significant price difference between the sender’s country and the recipient’s country for a particular game. Buyers will noticed that the game will not be available to be purchased as a gift when that happens. Any gifts already purchased before this update are not affected.
We all know that Steam games have vastly different prices in different countries and the sad part is that players will not be able to get their friends to purchase games in less expensive regions to be gifted into their account.
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