Ah, fuck.

:-/

So if I'm reading this right, current titles we have in inventory won't be affected, but we won't be able to buy games as inventory gifts from here on out. Hmm.

It seems their main goal with this is to fight fraudulent uses of the system, like money-laundering-ish stuff, but having it hit regular users like this certainly does suck.

One person mentioned that buying Humble Bundle steam keys might be a worthy alternative, but I'm not too familiar myself with how convenient that may or may not be and how it'll affect prices in the end for sales and suchlike.

In reply to the above comment, Humble bundle keys could be good, if you do not care about what games you could give away, and it could also allow for winners of your contests to choose from the set, or various other things that can be handled by using this method. However that is only IF you want to get the humble bundle.

Still though, I feel there is no excuse for this. It is bad enough that they remove the option, but then try and lighten the blow by trying to say it is better for us.. 1) never tell the customer what to think, and 2) it ended up becoming a hard slap to the face. Good job Steam....

The goal of disrupting fraud isn't technically a bad one, but I don't think this was the best way to handle it, and they never did emphasize that in the news blurb - they only said it was good and that's pretty much it. No surprise it isn't getting received well when they chose to word it so vaguely. And having this functionality gone is a shame regardless of reason anyway, it was certainly quite useful.