Steam removes inventory gifting

what a shame!

Yay! Another brainless decision from Valve. Hello Humble, my old friend.

Im wondering if this will affect my next custom orders on Tremorgames... im kinda worried now. :|

That is brutal.

First, trade hold for 3 days. After, trade hold for 15 days. Now this shit. Come on Steam... Wtf is this shit.
Fuck you GabeN!

This was the last straw, to kill trading for good - whats left is now bundle and retail keys. (At least from the current looks of it gift trading has been/will be rendered pointless). Thanks volv - won't anyone tell me, that ACTUAL GIFTING shit in steam is a thing lol just buy them the god darn steam wallet code/card or even better gift the money in a way it isn't bound to "vidya-gaems-drm".

Well, this sucks big time. Not only for this site, but also for us who buy extra copies of multiplayer games to give to friends in case you want to get a group together and play the games. Guess I'll buy fewer multiplayer games.

Valve always was a shitty company not caring about their customers at all - it is all about money. They don't even inform you about such changes, you need to use other media like SG. The only thing that changed over the years is the fact that Valve knows they now own a vast majority of the PC video game market and got an army of die-hard fanboys making it impossible to fight with such changes. We need to start the revolution right here, right now! Commies unite! :d

Edit: I find it amazing that some people praise this fat-valve-guy as a Jesus himself and for what? Selling games at a higher price than anyone else? It must be hard to survive with just 30% profit on every sold game by the way :d

I'm normally buying keys but I think this is a shitty move who will affect sales. Every day steam gets more and more restrictive and fanboyism seems to be okay with this. I'm guessing that some stores will be "destroyed" by this. Some vietnamese guy in reddit says his store will be affected by this shitty move.

I'm the only one who thinks this makes the reseller's site more and more visible and "right"? Valve should be encouraging their store, not fucking it.

rip steamgifts.com

Did they say anything about 4-packs?

Thanks traders aka. grey market! It was a move the publishers wanted them to do eventually.

I fucking knew it! I was always saying it that steam would do that. I was 100% sure. They want to slowly destroy trading. -_- But traders will prevail! :P

Well that's unfortunate, a lot of the unbundled games I've given away on SG were gifts. Looks like I won't be able to do that anymore :/ Less money for Valve I suppose.

Make giveaway. Have winner. Buy gift. Send.
Or bad idea?

I'm really curious as to what Steam's reasoning behind this is. Surely not a clever business decision.

I will be as honest as possible: Assholes.

Community would like to see LORD. I'd ask him about it. Whose made those changes? And look at his eyes.

Does this mean we can't keep gifts anymore on Inventory ? ;_;
Volvo gg

I don't trade but won't this hike trading gift copy prices now as every gift copy of a game is now limited.

Bad news, but this thing is bigger.

System of storing gifts in inventories was creating a situation, when each new 'historical minimum' for the games was bounding (marginally) the lowest market prices because of creating a large supply of cheap game copies in inventories of resellers, thus starting a 'slow bomb' of making lower profits for these discounted games from this moment of time and forever. For Steam and Devs, but not necessarily for users.
What I mean by this - for example if a game was ever sold with discount 80%, there were certainly numerous resellers who got the game copies for future reselling with some income against this new price. Numerous offers of these cheap copies forever pin the market price to a new, lower levels, even if this supply is not unlimited, as 'damage is done'. Anyway, cheap copies (may) end up in libraries of users who would have bought the game paying much more, if there wouldn't exist this supply. Difference in price would bring profit not to some resellers, but to Steam (And devs, but of course Steam is barely playing here a role of justice warrior, they get cut. However if devs will be in loss too much they will not want to work with Steam).

Moreover, for Steam there is only a risk of Not making expected levels of profit in the future. There is barely a question of existence when you don't produce anything and get a quite huge cuts. For the game developers it is much more acute question: Do they earn enough for their work to survive and continue, or their games lose market price and just won't bring much money anymore, [while somebody keep profiting, selling games for still higher price]?

As a result, all of this jeopardizes the whole idea of sales in store - Steam surely cuts some profits buy selling a lot of cheap copies instantly, when setting new historical minima, but then they can forget of doing much profit until the next, bigger sale. Because of previous system, they not only caged themselves in getting most of profits during the sales (which is not a healthy model for any business, as they lose who knows how much potential profit), but their actions put game developers and publishers in loss because of dropping global market prices for their games forever, to Steam historical minima (that is why some devs try to avoid Steam or try not to agree on low sale prices, but this is not a solution as most of users will likely just buy another, cheaper games), and of course they are accountable for existing of a huge grey market (Trade of Steam valuables outside of Steam, which harms users as they are taking risks, devs and store as they don't get profit from it, and benefits obviously only resellers. It is almost a piracy, which was let to be).

No wonder they want to revert, but there is always a chance that they will make it only worse. Somebody will always find exploits.
I mean, people are greedy. Everybody is simply and lowly greedy. Users will use grey markets as long as they can save a cent and will get scummed by greedy resellers (which are ultimately unneeded and exist because of users' greed or problems/restrictions created by greedy stores), official stores (especially of reselling nature) are only thinking of how to make profits from any interaction with them, a lot of devs and publishers last years are a greedy abominations who either create scum products to get easy buck from fools, or who try to sell their games overpriced not providing at the same time corresponding quality/support.

For now these news completely harm users who were buying presents for future gifting or giveaways; but frankly speaking gifters are so rare oddities that Steam wouldn't give a F, and if somebody truly wants to give a gift, they can find a way - by paying more, for example! "Yeah, let's make extra on these foolish freaks, gifters, why not. Let's exploit these alien generous motives and make them pay more straight to us, and not necessarily the cheap price."
Next natural steps include restricting small devs to generate steam keys as they please, because this is also a feature that decreases the market prices and someone else is getting profit with no cut for steam (dev, bundle sites, resellers etc.)

We will certainly see here less unbundled good games, that were discounted on Steam. But this is not the end as there is so many retailers.
Taking wrong measures would only harm Steam. I wish greed to eventually backfire, but speaking of Steam, there is too much money already invested by people all around the world. Would be disastrous if they went bankrupt at some point, for example. Who would maintain everything we bought? Meh, if only everything in the world was managed by clever and honest people, this would be a paradise T_T