Home / Software & Gaming / Valve is introducing new restrictions to Steam Gifting

Valve is introducing new restrictions to Steam Gifting

Steam's gifting feature has been very useful over the years but the system is open to some abuse, whether it be ‘gift sellers' on sites like G2A, or cheaters buying games for secondary accounts. However, it looks like Valve is now catching on, as it has been announced that Steam Gifts will now come with some new anti-cheat restrictions.

Going forward, if you gift a game to someone and that user goes on to cheat in that game, you will no longer be able to gift that game to anyone. This essentially hits two birds with one stone, those selling cheap copies of CS:GO as gifts will no longer be able to do so if just one person uses that game to cheat. It should also put a dent in the rampant use of secondary Steam accounts to cheat with.

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Valve made the announcement on Steam today, saying: “If an account has directly gifted a game to other players who have been VAC or permanently Game Banned, then that account will lose the ability to gift that game.”

On top of that, you can no longer buy games and stash them in your inventory if it has Game Ban or VAC anti-cheat enabled. So survival games like Rust, or competitive games like CS:GO may hopefully see a reduction in cheaters going forward due to these new gift restrictions.

KitGuru Says: These restrictions will be inconvenient to some legitimate gift buyers, but if this move ends up drastically reducing the amount of cheaters in online games, then it is likely for the best. What do you guys think of these new changes? 

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21 comments

  1. Sites like G2A and Kinguin are a necessary evil. Game prices are rocketing while wages and income are not. So, really, for me, any attempt to stamp these sites out is frustrating.

  2. QQ, save up your pocket money?

  3. More like a family guy with 4 kids 😉

  4. Pocket money? Are you fucking serious? Do you think everybody is a 12 year old who gets regular pocket money? 60 euros is a shitload of money for most of the people, and that’s why they buy from G2A and similiar websites

  5. OK, and whose fault is that? xD

  6. It was a joke, not a dick, don’t take it so hard.

  7. Mine, i hope!

  8. we aren’t your mom, so go find your dicks elsewhere

  9. Original.

  10. I believe steam is getting too big for their britches.

  11. I’ve started using a VPN recently to buy my Steam games from Russia, nailed I am Setsuna and We Happy Few Few for about €8 each and you can buy Infinite Warfare with the season pass and CoD4 Remastered for around €50, Kinguin’s great and all but gray market sites like don’t always have the best prices 😛

  12. Ok..that was good ! lol

  13. I remember being a kit, and wanting zelda 2 for the nes soo bad! It was 60 dollars. Back then, this was a ton of money as minimum wage was like 5-6 bucks an hour or something like that. When the N64 came out, and I wanted mario 64, it costed 60 dollars… some games even $70! When PlayStation 2 came out, some games were 60 dollars, some 50. And all these years later, when games like fallout 4 come out… they cost 60 dollars..

    Prices have not skyrocketed for games, they stayed about the same, and indy games on steam *which are better games then all that AAA trash* are dirt cheap. Games like 7 days to die should cost 100 dollars, cause it’s that good.

    So I call folly on your claim good sir knight!

  14. They are still expensive. For the same experience now you need to spend £80 a game, and minimum wage is £7ph or so in the UK.

  15. Does anyone play games anymore? G2A and Kington make money off collectors, I swear it’s a new form of addiction. All of my mates do it, Example friend 1: I just bought Fallout 4 (1hr played), friend 2: yeah I got that when it came out (90 mind played)…… OK guys what we doing tonight……… PAUSE…….. Friend 1 DOTA? (1800Hrs played)……. So who is buying Battlefield? Yeah Yeah me probably yeah

  16. This may be a problem for gifting sites like steamgifts and steamtrades (great community, at least back when I used it). If it works retroactively, I just hope I didn’t gift a game to any cheater out there.

  17. <<rw. ★★✫★★✫★★✫★★✫★★✫★★✫★★✫★★✫★★✫★★✫★★✫★★✫★★✫★★✫★★✫★★✫★★✫★★::::::!ir272m:….,…..

  18. Where are you buying games from? Unless you’re buying collectors editions you don’t pay more than £40-50, and if you wait for a month or 2 it will usually show up in a sale for 10-20% off

  19. Yeah those are games + season pass prices (the same experience as the hayclon N64/PS1 days).

    Usually games are about £45-50 on Amazon. I’ve had some for less.

  20. Game prices are lower than ever, especially if you consider inflation. I guess if you’re the type who has to have everything the moment it’s released, no matter how trivial the DLC is, then you may have a problem. Which still doesn’t explain why you’d advocate going to sites that sell stolen keys instead of just pirating the games.

  21. BUY from GoG where possible always. FK DRM