karandaev
Steam has announced a few big changes to its Gifting process, and they could sound good or bad, depending on your stance. It's putting the Gift to E-mail and Gift to Inventory options out to pasture, replacing it with a system that directly exchanges games from buyer to receiver. It's most likely an action taken to curtail grey market trades, since resellers tend to buy several copies during sales to sell over time. However, that might also make it impossible for collectors to get old and rare titles. You can at least send gifts months in advance, though, in case you want your friend to receive the game on a special day.
That said, things are now more complicated if you have a lot of friends abroad: the gaming platform says you won't be able send a gift if there's a large difference in pricing between countries. That means you can't send your friends across the globe that cool game during a sale if its price hasn't been slashed in their region.
According to some NeoGAF forum posters, gifts won't go through if the price difference is 10 percent or more. That part of the update also implies that you won't be able to send games to regions where they're not available, since Steam won't have pricing to compare. We've reached out to the platform to confirm, and we'll update this post when we hear back.
Even if you didn't like the other updates in this rollout, you might like the last new feature in the list. You can now get your money back if you sent something the recipient already has. So long as your friend chooses to decline your gift, you'll get a refund instead of getting the game back in your inventory.