Steam Wishlists Now Have Categories for Easier Game Organization
▼ Summary
– Steam is adding wishlist categories, allowing users to organize games by their own criteria such as genre or release year.
– Users can filter their wishlist to view specific categories and set notification preferences for games in those categories.
– Wishlists can now be shared with friends and family, making it easier for them to buy games for you.
– Guest checkout has been expanded to allow purchasing any game on Steam, not just gift cards or hardware.
– Cross-region gifting is now supported, enabling users to gift games to friends in different countries.
Steam users have long had a near-religious attachment to the wishlist system. Thousands of titles stacked in one endless queue, each one a promise of future gaming sessions that rarely materialize because, let’s face it, life gets in the way. But now, Valve is finally giving players a way to bring some order to that chaos: categories are coming to Steam wishlists.
“With so many amazing games on Steam, players are wishlisting more and more titles,” Valve explained in a blog post. “Existing options like ranking and filtering are great, but players have asked for even more ways to manage their Steam wishlists. Today we’re adding categorization as well as improved search and sharing to the wishlist.”
The beauty of the new category system is that you decide the structure. Sort by genre, release year, review scores, alphabetical order, or even whether a game is legally playable in the UK given the current age-verification hurdles. The possibilities are nearly endless. Once your categories are set and games assigned, you can filter your wishlist to show only what matters at a given moment.
When adding a new title to your wishlist, you can now drop it directly into a specific category. You can also choose what kind of notifications you receive for each game. And perhaps most useful of all, you can share your entire wishlist with friends and family. That brings us to the other major update: gifting just got a whole lot simpler.
Valve introduced a guest checkout option back in 2024, but it only worked for digital gift cards and hardware. Now, that same guest checkout can be used to purchase any game on Steam. Share your wishlist link, and your loved ones can buy you titles you’ll probably shelve for years. Alternatively, you can send a game directly to someone’s email address. No need to know their Steam username. As Valve notes, even if your nephew’s email is the same one tied to their Steam account, the gift email will include a link that lets them sign in and accept it.
There’s also cross-region gifting now, so you can buy games for friends no matter where they live. All these features make the process smoother, but let’s be honest , they’re also designed to make it easier for you to spend more money on Valve’s platform.
(Source: Rock Paper Shotgun)
