Create one giveaway with more than one game

If ever.... one can always hope... :)

And someone can just bruteforce it

This has happened to me as well! So there could be benefit in both giving and receiving! :)

Solution - only allow people who do not own any of the gifted items to enter?

Valid point.

When Steam bundles that include more than one product - where the winner might already own one or more of the them, Steam simply eats the extra keys and sends back a "registered" for the bundle. In my suggested case, Steamgifts would have to wade thru that.

I am thinking out loud here...

Structure: If the SG database were a multi-dimensional database like I used to work with, this could be done easily in a single record with minimal extra code needed. I am assuming this is not such an animal. Even so, I don't know that everything would need to be linked in a single database record. If each product in the giveaway were treated functionally at the database level as actual individual giveaways, each with (mostly, normally) the same winner, I think this becomes less convoluted and there would be no need to file all into a single record.

But certainly some new capability/data storage would need to added. Perhaps the capability to write the same giveaway code in more than one record (and it seems pretty clear that this would not be a good idea for a couple of reasons that I can think of)... or (sigh) add another field to the database that would allow the individual games to be tied together... or perhaps if the system would allow it, an optional extra digit addendum to the existing giveaway id that if existent would indicate that it is a part of a multi-giveaway. And yes there is some coding involved there certainly!

Function: Steam gifts could do something similar to what Steam does... stipulate that the first game listed must be a base game and then simply check that first game for activation. I think this creates other problems. It would prevent any DLC only bundles. It would open a door for some abuse from the winners in not activating any keys but the first. It would also prevent anyone who already owned that base game from entering the contest (since it is what is being checked for activation). I personally often set up such giveaways that way - where I only offer the base game in the giveaway and then send the other keys afterwards. Others however might have different wishes here.

The same idea a little more general would remove the "base game" requirement and simply require that the first item list is the one that would be checked for activation on Steam.

A more refined version of the same idea would be to check all the games (going my my original comment where I was thinking this could actually be multiple giveaways houses in a single event all going to the same winner. If there were 5 items in the giveaway and the winner owned 2 of them, he or she would simply get the 3 remaining keys and the other two would be returned to the gifter (that is automatically cancelled without action by an admin needed)... or a re-roll for those 2 keys could be automatically rerolled (no admin action required).

A further refinement would be to allow the gifter to decide which or how many keys had to be new for the winner. For example, out of 5 products... if a user owns game #1 OR game #3, entry is denied. This would allow the "individual contests" mechanism to continue to function although coding would clearly be necessary to so that if games (in this example) games #2, #4 or #5 were already owned the contest could still be entered.

This is clearly not as trivial as it might have seemed at first thought! And I realize the odds of it coming to fruition are very small, but at least some of can derive a bit of pleasure in talking about it. I know I am. :)

That would certainly work! It even is more "correct", I'd say. But I think my not wanting to do any more work than necessary would win out over my liking of doing things the right / better / more elegant way in this case. I can almost always leave the extra keys in one of the winner's previous giveaways with less effort. In cases where there are no giveaways that I have access to, I will almost certainly do this! :)

I have done the same thing and have had the same result as you had. I have contacted a winner who was surprised to know that there was more to the gift. It is frustrating when that happens!

If no one is adding features... nothing can go wrong with a feature that is not added. 😉

If someone is coding to make a feature work, one would hope that it was thoroughly tested before making it available to all of Steamgifts.

In either case, there is no harm in discussing it and how it might be implemented. 😀

I normally use ended giveaways from the winner to pass the keys.

Veebles (as he often does) provided another neat way to do it. Create a private giveaway for each of the DLCs and then give the winner the link to those. It gives you the opportunity to check if the winner already owns the dlc before sending it and it then counts (or maybe it doesn't with only a single entry?) towards your leveling up.

As a makeshift, if you trust your winner to read your giveaway description (wherein you'd indicate what you're trying to do), you can use a humble link format (since anything following the humble url shouldn't be blocked by SG) to both include your key and any subsequent keys as one batch. It's been a long while since I've done it myself, but I suppose it'd be something like https://www.humblebundle.com/gift?key=TheseAreSteamKeysNotHumbleKeysEnjoy+123ABC-123ABC-123ABC++ABC123-ABC123-ABC123

You may have to fiddle around and see what SG is willing to accept but, I do recall it basically allowing anything so long as https://humblebundle.com/gift was the prefacing context.

It's messy, but I do recall doing it in the past and it working out just fine. But I mean, we're talking years ago, so between possible formatting changes from cg and my rapidly dulling memory, it's still a bit of an uncertain thing. So do let me know what your results are, if you end up trying it. ^.^

Valid point.

The counter point would be that this is no different than the current situation (without the benefit of having the feature built-in to SG). SG does not validate and any checking (for example of DLCs after gifting the base game) is done by the gifter. I know I have given DLCs and wondered if the winner activated them or not and sighed and hoped that my gift was not simply taken advantage of.