And this passed under our radar. In an attempt to reduce instances of charge-back scams, Valve recently made some changes to Steam’s gift trading rules, resulting in a number of complaints.
For what is worth, simple gifting remains the same as before. You can gift your games at any time.
Gift trading, on the other hand, has been slightly changed. As Valve noted, ‘all new games purchased as a gift and placed in the purchaser’s inventory will be untradable for 30 days.’
Valve explained those changes, claiming that they will, essentially, provide a better overall experience to traders.
“We’ve made this change to make trading gifts a better experience for those receiving the gifts. We’re hoping this lowers the number of people who trade for a game only to have the game revoked later due to issues with the purchaser’s payment method.”
In short, if you are trading gifts, you should be aware of those changes.
Kudos to our reader ‘Johnny Bravo’ for bringing this to our attention!
John is the founder and Editor in Chief at DSOGaming. He is a PC gaming fan and highly supports the modding and indie communities. Before creating DSOGaming, John worked on numerous gaming websites. While he is a die-hard PC gamer, his gaming roots can be found on consoles. John loved – and still does – the 16-bit consoles, and considers SNES to be one of the best consoles. Still, the PC platform won him over consoles. That was mainly due to 3DFX and its iconic dedicated 3D accelerator graphics card, Voodoo 2. John has also written a higher degree thesis on the “The Evolution of PC graphics cards.”
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It’s funny how people complain about things they don’t own xD
in short, we are doing this to fight discount sellers cuz we want all your monies instead.
Some people are claiming it is to fight RU resellers.
But the reality is the number of stolen CC purchases being made and games being revoked after a trade has been completed is the primary reason if not the only reason they did this.
I have guys with 10k or 5k trades and they only traded TF2 items yet they got restricted on purchases because they are from RU. So it can’t have anything to do with cross-region trading from my own experience.
I also know people who bought DayZ for 5/10 TF2 keys only to have it removed from their account because the gift was CC purchased and Steam found out it was stolen, chargeback you know. So.
And for anyone that wants to know. You can buy a game, keep it in your inventory, gift it to a friend that same day and they can gift it to another person. So there is no lock on the purchase being gifted multiple times, you just can’t trade it. I tested it out yesterday during the sale.
This stops stolen CC purchase which is awesome IMO.
If they offered more payment methods eg skrill (you cant charge back those) then there would be no need to introduce this restriction
I know nothing about skrill but the fact is, regardless, a stolen CC payment can be withheld from every level. So unless and I haven’t googled this, skrill can not be held accountable or refunded from the amount, steam would still remove the item purchased using skrill with a stolen CC. Maybe I am wrong. And maybe theives don’t use skrill anyways. IDK.
In the end I agree with Steams decision but not with people like me having been on Steam for 9 years with thousands of trades and markets purchases. And a CC that hasn’t changed in years. I am not saying me me but you know what I mean. Maybe. There are a group of us that I will say, don’t deserve to have restrictions like this in place but that’s me being super elitist.