Valve has taken action to reduce scamming in the Steam marketplace, implementing a 30 day no-trade policy on games purchased as gifts. Note that this does not affect gifting games, only trading games in the marketplace.
The reason for the change is scammers who would buy games using stolen or dodgy payment methods, trade the games in the marketplace (often for common currency equivalents such as Team Fortress 2 keys) then have the game purchase cancelled by Valve due to the payment bouncing or being cancelled. Considering the size of the ‘underground’ trade market the problem has caused enough headaches at Valve to require action, one that may inconvenience some legitimate traders.
The Steam underground economy can be a dark, dangerous place, but there is definitely a need for people who own items of some worth to be able to turn them into something usable. You can’t cash out Steam wallet currency so the only option for those who don’t want to venture into the even shadier key trading market is to trade their items for legitimate games. That has just become a bit more difficult, but Valve have employed economists and know their systems better than anybody, in this case they have decided that the pain of some marketplace users is worth the gain they get from not dealing with as many scams.
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