Valve won’t let you gift CS:GO during Steam sale

The Steam Summer sale kicked off last night and there are plenty of great discounts going around. However, some people use opportunities like this to stock up on certain games to gift to alternate accounts and in the case of CS:GO, people doing this usually do so with the intention of smurfing or hacking. That won't be happening this year though, as Valve has disabled Steam Gifting for CS:GO during the summer sale.

Right now, Counter-Strike: Global Offensive is going for £6 on Steam and when one Redditor discovered that he couldn't buy the game as a gift, a Valve representative explained: “CS:GO will not be giftable during the sale. Our goal with sales is to grow the community and historically, during sales, the new users that stick around are mainly the ones that purchase copies for themselves.”

Essentially, Valve wants to stop CS:GO players to use sales as a reason to stock up on alternate accounts, whether that be to gain access to lower matchmaking rankings as a highly skilled player (smurfing), or whether that be to have some back-up accounts to use cheats with.

Obviously these people could still buy the game on those alt-accounts instead, tying their payment methods and addresses to the account. However, that does give Valve more data to track people back to their main accounts.

KitGuru Says: The obvious downside to this is that if there is someone you actually wanted to gift CS:GO to, you will now have to send them money some other way to do it themselves. The upside is that hopefully CS:GO will see less of a surge in alt-accounts over the course of the sale. 

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