Buying someone else a Steam game got a lot easier today. You no longer have to be Steam friends with the person to whom you’re sending a gift, and don’t even need a Steam account. You can also select gifts directly from a shared wishlist.
Here are today’s Steam gifting changes, in short:
Previously, sending a gift on Steam meant asking the recipient for their Steam account name and friending them, which dampens the surprise a bit.
My only wish now is for a simple way to stuff a Steam game into a physical card for birthdays and holidays. Steam retired physical gift cards recently, citing fraud. (With these new features, you could gift a game to an email address you control, and then print out the redemption link and make the recipient type it in manually, which is slightly mean in a way that I approve of as an uncle.)