is SteamGifts Dying?

SG is gonna live as long as Steam is gonna live, aka forever

This has been asked throughout years again and again. The golden days of cheap and plentiful bundles has ended + steam changed their gifting policies. Hence the numbers of giveaways started dropping.

But more importantly I would ask you to look at yourself first. Why have you only given away 4 games and last one a year ago? Maybe answering that will also give you insight on why there are not so many active users who do many giveaways, The site cant just survive on several super generous users.

Even though doing bundle left overs, at least I (as many other) try to keep the site alive with that.

Aren't we all?

I just figured that, as we use the site more, we hide more giveaways and win more of the games we want to play, both of which make it seem like there are fewer giveaways to us because we're simply not seeing them all.

Was just wondering if this site is starting to get obsolete because I usually just see people dumping their unused HB games and not much else.

And what is it that you specifically want instead?

lol

Yes.
Too many autojoiners, multiaccounters, cheaters, exploiters and leechers.

Not so much "community", as it was in the past and this lower the will of people to gift much.

What did you want to talk with people that only use their thanks script, win automated and come only 1x/week along to claim their wins?

https://www.steamgifts.com/stats/community/giveaways
Shows it very well.

You're not wrong at the growth. It didn't grow as much as it did in the past. I try to promote the website when I make content on YouTube because nobody talks about it from what I saw online. Everybody who is a content creator and loves this website can very easily promote it because the reality is that I've grown to love this website.

On top of that, found some amazing people too.

View attached image.

The bundles got much more expensive. Missing myself the 1€/ $ Bundle from Humble. Now is the start price 8€/$ ( or something like that) the middle price / Tier is now much higher too. Have bought the middle Tier usually for the 5-7€. All prices are now much higher, not only for the games. The money that the people earn doesn't rise so high at the same time. At the "old time" i have always bought the first tier on humble and usually got the middle one too. Now i am buying the humble tiers not any longer and buy only the games that i am interested in from other people / sites. So far i can see this many people are doing it in the same way. I live in EU where the situation is not so bad, but still everyone is looking more and more on the money they spend.
It's difficult to buy now games only to spend them on the giveaways.

I guess we're just digital ghosts haunting this online place then

Is SteamGifts dying?

Yes.
And that is the natural way things are playing out.

SG had its heyday(s) starting in 2015, when Bundlesites really took off. Many bundlesites = many bundles = many people owning several copies of a game AND many cheap games available on the market = many giveaways.
The bundle craze is over.
Way less bundlesites = way less bundles = way less giveaways due to reasons stated above.
And that is okay.

Will SG vanish?
No, I am pretty sure it will stay around for the time being. But smaller and with less giveaways.

SG will really die when the corporations disable buying of products licenses and everyone needs her/his own subscription to access games content without any way of transfering said content.
Until this happens, my prediction is SG will stay alive on its death bed.

Bundles have gotten too expensive, we used to get solid $1 bundles every week. Now you build your bundle and hope the Humble Monthly is worth it.

Blacklisting for snowflake reasons, puzzles on other website, point system not rewarding like before, bundle are more expensive and with shittier games, issue with gifting via steam by region.....

But we might still be able to win game on the website even if sent to the frontline during WW3.

I didn't know SG at the time of its "glory" .

Still, I find the community nice (mostly) and there are people here that I like to read. And this is probably the best reason (winning games comes clearly after) why i stayed.

I may not offfer unbundled games , but I think I'm doing my part to keep the site running a bit.

If someone like me who hasn't been here very long still wants to stay, there must be others.

So I feel we have some time before thinking about oblivion.

SG will be around until the end of Steam, probably. However, we are well passed the golden age of 1$ great bundles, plus Steam restricted the gifting process. Having a huge backlog accompanies not buying as many bundles as before (for me it's almost none in the last years), they're not good anyway, winners not playing their great wins even after years, so many bots and autojoiners, region jumpers (some of my region restricted giveaways created for Turkey, ended up going to the people who don't even know Turkish), Steam being turning into asset-flip garbage site inflamed the black market and the people who are trying to cheat the system here, there are a lot of reasons like these.

I much prefer donating to my favorite open-source projects rather than gifting games to people who probably won't even play them.

Let me see... taking into account that you live in an Asian timezone and that there has always been times of the day that this website seemed dead, there is a chance that you are visiting steamgifts on a nearly dead time (when it's too late at night in Western countries, where I suppose most users are from).

Also, I may be wrong, but I don't think most Steam users' local currency is USD, EUR or GBP. I don't know about other people's reality, but I live in a country where USD worths 5 times the local currency, excluding the taxes for international transactions. USD value used to be 2 or 3 times the local currency around 10 years ago, but I didn't know this site or have an international credit card at that time. After that time, even with dollar value getting higher, Steam got into a lot of countries, like here, where it had local prices adapted to the reality of each country. For example, instead of turning a US$10 game to $50 in my local currency, the game used to cost just around $35 in the local currency, which was fair. Because of that, though, region restriction was imposed, so people couldn't freely give a game to a person from a country from a different price zone anymore. Where I live, especifically, government is good at taxing anything, so they found a way to tax Steam prices as well, keeping through the years the taxes high and the wages low. Anyway, paying anything in US dollar or euro is a no-no for most users who live in poor countries, since it's prohibitive for someone who still has other stuff to afford with their (monthly) wage. So despite the effort of some people here to try to make other users feel bad for not spending over 1000 dollars/year to make giveaways or for making region-restricted giveaways, buying a bundle was still more expensive than buying directly from Steam in your local currency.

Also, after some years, publishers have found out the power of PC community, so their greed made them want to milk that for-many-years-ignored market, making their releases incredibly expensive and sometimes even doubling the price of some of their old games that used to have fair prices on Steam ☆coughscrewyousegacough☆. In countries like here, prices of those publishers' games started to be real convertions of the US dollar price instead of fair localized prices. So a US$10 game started to really cost over $50 in my local currency, for example, and, of course, a US$ 60 release costed $300 here (with was around 1/3 of the minimum monthly wage) ☆coughscrewyousquareenixcough☆. Around that same time, Steam abolished their gift system, which forced people who used to make their giveaways purchased directly from Steam to look for other ways to make their giveaways. At that time, bundle stores started to convert their prices to other countries currencies as well, so some games from bundles were also region-restricted. I suppose that it was the first time that certain users finally found out what region restriction was, since it existed long before, but had no effect on them. So region-restricted giveaways became more common, alongside some ashamed apologies, which is kinda funny/ironic/ridiculous, since the mere act of giving something away should make you free of any need for apologies. Well, it's just the result of the culture created here.

Through the last years, a lot of countries, sooner or later, for diverse reasons, experienced inflation, something known as "normal" (i.e., terrible, but yet common) for people from some countries and experienced just once a decade in other countries. So some users experienced for the first time how is not having an AAA game costing less than 10 dollars/euros/pounds four times a year. Bundled games became even more common than after the end of gifts, but now they started to feel expensive for them as well. Even so, you can notice the same games are always being given away more often than it used to happen when gifts were still around.

After that, Epic Games Store entered the market. Even having some exclusive games, some better prices and weekly giveaways of good games that everyone gets, but nobody plays on their launcher, they couldn't scrape the Steam dominance over the market. Then, Steam, after realizing that we, Steam users, were suckers loyal enough, they found an excuse to change the price table to every country, increasing the prices while being sure Steam users would still want to play everything on Steam. After that, at least where I live, some games on sale look like they are full price, and insanely overpriced when they are really full price ($360 for a 1-year-old game? That must be some kind of joke). That's why many people here where I live started to play more on consoles, since it's less costful here (but many people insist on claiming that playing on PC is cheaper without questioning themselves that it may not be true for other places).

Though after all those years, some people here still don't know how real life is outside their bubble. I realized that after having a conversation with an user who didn't know that wages were paid monthly, not weekly, in some countries like here. Also, I know an indie developer from here who know some indie developers from abroad. Before being a developer, as a gamer, he had always asked himself why indie developers didn't optimize their games for weaker PCs to reach more people, just like he tries to do nowadays. After he met indie developers from other countries and could ask by himself, he found that it didn't worry them at all, since a reasonably decent PC for gamers is cheap, in their vision, what's not true here where we live.

All of that plus the fact that some users being noisy about users that don't follow their self-imposed rules generated mutual blacklists (which didn't use to be mutual on the system, some years ago), what made people see less giveaways and start to have the increasing sensation, which may be true or false, that steamgifts is dying, while always blaming others for that. Personally, I wish I could be blacklisted more than once per person just to taste the real size of the wound I can cause to these fragile egos inflated by void arrogance (which I affectionately call 'self-sucking e-penises' ❤︎). Yeah, I'm freakin' sick.〜

There are also other reasons for your sensation that steamgifts is dying that other users may have already mentioned, but I won't cite on since they have been too repetitively mentioned through the years since before I started to use these forums.

For real, since I have seen this kind of stuff a lot of times before everywhere, I can tell you that the sensation and the complaining that a community is not as good as it used to be and may be close to end because of that always happen all the time. I'm not saying it's true or false, I'm just saying that people tend to always repeat that about a community at some point. It happened, it's happening right now and it will still happen in thousands of places of real life or internet. So just relax. Or don't relax, whatever.

Well I basically just got here, so I really hope not lol

Imho pretty much the opposite of what some people complain about is actually the true reason for SG's stagnation.
The biggest growth didn't happen back then because everything was better and the bundles were super cheap. No, the appeal of giveaways simply is way lower than it used to be.

Today you have tons of F2P options, Epic stuffing one game down everyone's throat every week, Game Pass is a thing, and bundles are more expensive but have constantly fed everyone's library. And of course there are grey sites selling games for cents sometimes.

Back then it was something special to have 100 games, today it's pretty much common to have access to thousands. So yes, people just don't need to rely on SG for more options to play games.
But god forbid that some people accept that gaming was never more affordable or better accessible for the masses out there than it is today. Nah, the evil greedy industry is behind SG's downfall!!!111

I'll keep this as short as possible -

1. The site has always been a "bundle-powered" site, because that's the most affordable option for users, and bundle prices have increased.
2. Valve made direct gifting between regions more difficult in order to add better regional pricing (in most cases)..
3. Steamgifts has become a "gated community" of sorts, where people only welcome others if they're making a boatload of giveaways. Who wants to join a community where you're immediately called a "leech" fi you don't make their quota? I have actually seen a Steamgifts user call another user a "leech" two days after he'd registered.

For my part, there's entirely too much bitching, pissing, and moaning about the most ridiculous shit around here, and not enough gifting. It's like high school all over again, watching users shoehorn one another into some bullshit category in order to assert some perceived form of superiority over them. Patting one's own back with one hand while slapping your neighbor with the other has become the norm.

Thanks for Skyrim.

If we go by the number of users who are winning hundreds or thousands of games and never giving away anything back, the site is alive and kicking...
Of course if we go by the number of giveaways and gifters, yeah there's a clear decline... I wonder why...

Bots ruining this system, that`s why. Also asset flippers - SG contribution level farmers with stupid and cheap 18+ puzzle games (Already hided ~280 those games)

I do see the quality of giveaways going down and the bot/abuser count go up. I wish the site could get updates instead of everyone peddling add-ons for it. Other than those issues, I don't see the users leaving over much else... and I don't really see the user base leaving enough to justify worrying.