The Steam Summer Sale has begun and a whole lot of games are being discounted, but Valve has decided to not let customers buy Counter Strike: Global Offensive as a gift during the Summer Sale.
As some customers might already have noticed CS: GO is not available to be bought as a gift now during the Summer Sale. With CS: GO being discounted from €13.99 to €6.99 some might have thought of this as the perfect time to buy it as a gift for that one friend they need on their team, but Valve is not letting people do that.
On the Counter Strike: Global Offensive subreddit Valve explained why they aren't letting the gifting happen.
"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."
The reasoning behind the non-gifting rule is that those who want CS: GO will buy if for themselves and they will help growing the playerbase while those who gets it gifted to it probably won't stay for too long which won't help grow the simulator.
This seems like some facade for the real reason, something people in the Reddit thread pointed out since buying and gifting the game will help grown the playerbase as well, not letting people gift it means Valve missing out on potential growth in the playerbase.
Instead the reason seems to be that Valve wants to stop other third party sites from reselling the game for a lower prices than Steam at a later date when the sale is over. Various online retail platforms are selling PC games for cheaper than Steam does and it is reasonable to believe that the non-gifting policy is to stop these third party sites from stocking up on codes for CS: GO to sell at a later date.
Whatever the reason is people still can't buy CS: GO as a gift and they probably wont be able to until the Summer Sale is over.
