Look, we all have that one friend who claims they’ll “get around to it” while their Steam wishlist reads like the Library of Alexandria. Thousands of titles, zero organization, pure chaos. Well, Valve just dropped an update that’s basically Marie Kondo for your digital backlog.
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Steam wishlists now support custom categories. That’s right — you can finally sort your 847 wishlisted indie darlings into folders instead of staring at a wall of thumbnails wondering which one was the one your coworker wouldn’t shut up about. Genre, release year, review score, whatever — you decide the system. The only rule is there are no rules, which is very on-brand for Valve.
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But wait, there’s more. When you add a game to your wishlist, you can slap it into a category right then and there. No more “I’ll organize this later” energy. And you can set per-game notification preferences, so that early access roguelike you’re cautiously optimistic about doesn’t blow up your inbox every time the devs push a patch.
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The gifting side of things got a glow-up too. Valve expanded guest checkout beyond gift cards and hardware — you can now buy any game for someone without even needing their Steam account. Just email it to them. Cross-region gifting is also live now, so that friend in Australia can finally stop complaining about not getting your birthday presents. Well, they’ll probably still complain, but at least the logistics are solved.
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The wishlist sharing feature is the real kicker though. You can now send your curated list to friends and family, basically handing them a cheat sheet for what you actually want. Gone are the days of vague hints and hoping someone remembers that offhand comment you made six months ago about a game with “cool art direction.”
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Is this Valve’s way of extracting more money from us? Absolutely. Does it also solve a problem that’s been quietly annoying the entire Steam user base for years? Also yes. Sometimes the corporate incentives align with genuine quality-of-life improvements, and we should just take the win.
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Now if you’ll excuse me, I have 2,347 games to sort into categories. I’m thinking “Games I’ll Play This Century” and “Games I’ll Play Next Century.” The list is looking pretty even right now.
Jordan Hayes is a staff writer at SteamGamer.net covering PC gaming news, hardware, and the latest from the Steam ecosystem. When not writing, Jordan is probably buried in a roguelike or arguing about GPU prices.
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