If your Steam wishlist is a graveyard of impulse saves from six different Steam sales, last week’s update was made for you. Valve has added proper category support to wishlists, and it’s genuinely the most useful organizational tool the feature has ever had. Here’s a full breakdown of how everything works and some practical ideas for actually using it.
For the full news breakdown of what else changed in this update — including the gifting overhaul, email gifting, and cross-region purchasing — check out our Steam gifting update explainer. This guide focuses specifically on getting your wishlist organized.
How to Create Wishlist Categories
Categories work like folders or tags for your wishlisted games. There’s no restriction on what you name them or how many you create — it’s entirely up to you. Here’s how to get started:
- Open your Steam wishlist and look for the category management option at the top of the page
- Create a new category and give it whatever name makes sense for how you think
- Assign games to categories either from your existing wishlist or directly from a game’s store page when adding it for the first time
- A single game can belong to multiple categories simultaneously, so you’re not forced to pick just one
- Once categories exist, they appear as tabs at the top of your wishlist — one click filters the whole list down to just that group
The categories you use most frequently will also start appearing in the “Add to Wishlist” dropdown on individual game store pages, so over time the system starts to adapt to how you actually use it.
Practical Category Ideas Worth Stealing
The system is only as useful as the categories you create. Here are some setups that actually make sense depending on how you use your wishlist:
For Personal Organisation
- Buy on Sale — games you want but only at a discount. Filter this during Steam sales to focus your spending
- Full Price OK — the rare titles you actually want at launch regardless of cost
- Controller Required — games you want to play on the couch or Steam Deck specifically
- Co-op — everything you’re waiting to play with someone else so you don’t buy them solo by accident
- Short Games — titles you can finish in a sitting or two, useful when you want something completable quickly
- Demo Available — though Steam now flags this automatically, having a category for games you specifically want to try before buying is still useful
For Gifting and Sharing
- Birthday List — curated and shareable with family who want to buy you something specific
- Christmas / Holiday — separate from the birthday list so you can share different links at different times of year
- Gift Ideas for Others — games you’re thinking about buying for someone else, kept separate from your own wants
For Tracking Releases
- Coming Soon — games not yet released that you’re watching
- Early Access — titles in EA that you want to check back on at 1.0
- Wishful Thinking — games you probably won’t buy but can’t bring yourself to remove
Per-Category Sale Notifications
This is one of the most practical improvements in the entire update. Previously, sale notifications applied to your whole wishlist — meaning during something like the Steam Summer Sale you’d get an overwhelming wave of alerts covering games you barely remember adding. Now you can toggle notifications on or off per category.
The practical use case is obvious: enable notifications for your “Buy on Sale” and “Full Price OK” categories, and disable them for anything else. Your notifications immediately become more signal and less noise during sales windows, which is when most people actually act on wishlist items anyway.
Demo Availability Notifications and Flags
Steam now automatically flags when a game on your wishlist has a playable demo available — it appears directly on the wishlist entry so you can spot it without visiting individual store pages. You can also opt in to get notified specifically when demos drop for wishlisted games, separate from your sale notifications.
This is genuinely useful for indie games in particular, where demos are often available for a limited window around a festival or sale event. If you’ve got a long wishlist and you rely on demos to decide whether something is worth buying, this flag means you won’t miss the window.
Sharing a Specific Category — Not Your Whole List
When sharing your wishlist, you can now generate a link that points directly to a specific category rather than your full list. This is the update’s most socially useful feature by some margin.
How it works in practice:
- Generate a shareable link for a specific category (like “Birthday List”)
- Send that link to whoever you want — they don’t need a Steam account to view it or buy from it
- When they open the link and choose a game to purchase, your details auto-fill as the recipient at checkout
- The rest of your wishlist — everything in other categories — stays completely hidden
- You can revoke any shared link at any time
The privacy angle here matters. If you’ve got games on your wishlist you don’t particularly want people to know about, keeping them in an unshared category means sharing a birthday list doesn’t accidentally expose your whole wishlist. This was one of the most commonly requested wishlist improvements from the Steam community for years.
What Else Changed on the Wishlist Page
Beyond categories, a few smaller quality-of-life improvements also shipped in this update:
- Autocomplete search — the in-wishlist search now suggests titles as you type and returns results faster than before
- Microtrailers on hover — hover over a game in your wishlist and a short clip plays automatically, the same way it does on store pages. Useful for remembering why you added something months ago
- Improved navigation flow — after visiting a game page from your wishlist and coming back, the page now returns you to where you were rather than resetting to the top
- Better readability — general interface improvements across PC, mobile, Steam Deck, and Steam Machine
A Quick Note on the Gifting Side
The wishlist categories tie directly into the gifting overhaul that shipped in the same update. When someone you’ve shared a category link with buys a game from it, they don’t need a Steam account — guest checkout now works for any game, not just hardware and gift cards. The shared link auto-fills your details as the recipient, so there’s no friction on their end either.
For the full breakdown of email gifting, cross-region purchases, and everything else that changed on the gifting side, our Steam gifting update guide covers it all in detail.
For more on what’s going on across gaming right now, check out the story of how Kingdom Hearts almost didn’t get approved and the latest on the Rockstar union pushing for formal recognition before GTA 6 launches in November.
