Looking at the users stats here:
https://www.steamgifts.com/stats/community/users

It can be seen that the number of users has increased steady from 2011 to 2017, then the trend has slowed down afterward.
I just joined this website, so I wonder what has happened around 2017 to lead to this change?

My first though is among the following:

  • Some Steam changes which make gifting/key sharing unfavorable. If this is the case, can you elaborate more?
  • AAA games are not available anymore via key retailer.
  • Maybe human has evolved and does not play games anymore 😂.

Could someone help to enlighten me on this matter? Thanks!

1 year ago

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I don't have an answer, but I feel like that is just how things work. There are a certain number of people that would want to use a site like this. The site starts to become popular and talk about it spreads throughout the gaming community. The vast majority of the people that would want to join do so over a certain period of time and then the number of new users joining starts to fall off because most of the people that would want to join have already done so.

Steam not giving the ability to buy games to store in your inventory and restricting who you can send games to based on the game price in your regions definitely made gifting harder, but that would probably cause some active users to stop gifting and become less active rather than causing less new users to join.

Also, a lot of people mainly use this site to give away their leftover bundle games, but the quality of bundles in the past few years has dropped drastically while the prices have been increasing. Like the Steam restrictions though, this would probably cause more of a falloff of active users rather than impacting how many new users are joining.

1 year ago
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I agree that the quality of bundles has dropped. HB also didn't give away great games as often as before.

1 year ago
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Check the date on this (by hovering over the timestamp on the bottom of the thread post):

https://www.steamgifts.com/discussion/ZIVso/autojoin-scripts

After cg started introducing anti-bot measures, fake accounts mostly stopped being made (at least, it went from "easy and common to spot" to "I sort of suspect maybe this one account.."). Due to that major influence, it became difficult to clearly ascertain any other factors that may have played a part in the seeming decline.

Steam removing gift storing and introducing currency-based region restrictions definitely hurt, but that's more something that hurt active users; It may have contributed to users leaving the site or reducing gifting, but it shouldn't have played any major part in users not joining the site, especially as the biggest tie-in to this site (barring in its very earliest years, wherein only unbundled content was allowed for giveaways) is bundles, which weren't affected by that.

"AAA games are not available anymore via key retailer." - I don't know to what you're referencing. 🤔


In addition to cg stopping bots, bundle frequency & quality took a significant downturn perhaps around 2018 (Humble Monthly was introduced in 2015 and changed to Choice in 2019, so that's not a clear factor; Rather, with both non-Humble bundle sites and Humble's own non-monthly bundles both making it far enough along a several year long decline to reach a status of "effectively dead" around that period, we can easily assume that the diminishment of overall bundle "culture" was the most likely core influence on the matter).

Clearly that doesn't line up right with the 2017-focused progression of population growth on SG, so we again are forced to assume anti-bot measures were the biggest component in the decline. All the moreso as cg and staff continued such efforts in the following years. Thus, while the decline in bundles may have played a part- perhaps even a large one- it's difficult to really guess at how big that contribution actually was.

As far as other factors, none really come to mind. Again, lots of factors that influenced people leaving the site or ceasing gifting (the overall decline in community discussions and events is definitely an easy to point out element, there), but there's really just those two for people not joining the site as much: The removal of multi-accounting and the decline in visible tie-in discussions to bundles*.

* (( With all bundles mostly just devolving into a single subscription service, regular discussions stopped really being a thing (at least, all the gaming-related sites and forum sites I'm familiar with massively declined such discussions over time), and those with subs often just mindlessly went along with their sub without really first looking into the surrounding discussions around each bundle, as they had perhaps been more prone to do in the past )).


TL;DR version / conclusion: It's possible there wasn't actually any decline, as the only clear information we have is that most of the initial account numbers were presumably vastly overinflated relative to real accounts (( in fact, after the anti-bot measures began, Russia went from the #1 region in site stats, to #2 or #3 (it's at #2, currently, I just forget if it went straight to that or not). As there were several known Russia-based SG farming groups at the time, this can easily be concluded to not be a coincidence. ))

That said, everything's based on the assumption the user account numbers don't auto-adjust (ie, reducing by suspended users), like many other stats do (whitelist/blacklist, for example, simply removes all counting of a list in the stats page once it's cancelled). If, as assumed, the number is static, then cg could probably give us some better numbers to work with by filtering against suspended accounts.

1 year ago*
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I think you're onto something here.
Also the number of Tickets seemed to be high at September 2017(the CG post time). and then it drops drastically. Eventually being more steady with time. Though that just might correlate with the number of Incoming users.

And presently, the number of open tickets w.r.t. to Unsuspend Requests are the highest compared to other categories. Perhaps this was the trend back then aswell? Leads me to think that September 2017 a lot of folks got a big fat No or something discouraging as an answer. Which led to even lower tickets and noise about the site.in general maybe?
I'm most likely entirely wrong. But its something that makes some sense to me.

1 year ago
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Also, trading sites like barter.vg really started gaining traction as it feels better for a lot of people to get something in return than to "give" their game away (Then of course having a small chance of winning something in return). I feel like more people are over there now than there are over here anymore. Even steamtrades doesn't compare.

Then you also have the issue of curators getting gift copies of games for reviewing purposes and just giving them away en mass to inflate their Contributor Level as high as possible.

Whole situation has kind of bummed me out, I barely use the site anymore other than to pop in every once in a while.

1 year ago
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I am not sure more people are trading than gifting. I'm pretty sure a lot more people are reselling bundle leftovers now though.

1 year ago
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Oh that too, but G2A has always been super popular so the anti-bot measures @Sooth mentioned probably helped with that decline. I wasn't arguing his points, just saying in addition to them. Oddly enough if you look at Barter.vg's FAQ section their last privacy update was in 2017, no idea when the creation exactly was before that.

Don't get me wrong, not bashing the site, it's cool. I have used it! I just also wish SG was as as popular as it used to be.

1 year ago
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And you were right to add trading. It's a big thing still.

1 year ago
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"AAA games are not available anymore via key retailer." - I don't know to what you're referencing. 🤔

That maybe my mis-impression then.
Years ago I would go looking for a key on a retailer website for the games I want.
But since Steam officially support my country, I found out that buying directly from Steam is almost cheaper.

Now I think that it's not because they are not available anymore, but because I'm not looking for them.

1 year ago
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I don't know about your country, but for North America (and from what I hear, Europe) it's still far cheaper in most cases to buy from Fanatical or Humble or WinGameStore or whatnot than Steam store (that is to say, they generally either have better discounts or get them earlier, even if in some cases that's only by a day).

That said, if your country has a very weak currency, and Steam accepts your currency directly (ie, versus tying it to the euro, for example), then it'd make sense that Steam store is cheaper- most other storefronts are based in NA/EU pricing and even where they accept other currencies (ie, without them having to be converted first) they generally seem to offer pricing based around the discounted NA/EU pricing, whereas Steam often caters more specifically to regional currency values.

Though, obviously, as someone in NA, my insights into regional pricing are going to be limited, so hopefully there's no misperceptions regarding that on my part.

Now, if you're talking unofficial key resellers, like G2A or Kinguin, then it seems incredibly likely that there'd have been a hit there, as the inability to store gifts in Steam inventory, combined with the removal of Steam store flash sales, as well as the increasing trend of having bundled/promotional keys expire after a time, have seemingly [note: I don't use resellers, so I'm basing this on outside discussions] had an effect on allowing resale pricing to have less price dropping and to recover to higher numbers much more quickly.

That's about the only real change I can see from storefronts overall, official or otherwise. Again, I feel as though the most likely answer is just that Steam is giving you better pricing for your region, which makes other storefronts (or resellers) seem less favorable, rather than them being less favorable directly. Or, for reseller sites, a basis in the same Steam changes that also made making unbundled giveaways on SG difficult.

1 year ago*
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This comment was deleted 1 year ago.

1 year ago
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By the time I joined it was no longer by invite, and I joined in December of 2011! I think I got in around the time the site opened up.

1 year ago
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🙄?
I think someone mentioned that there was a time when SteamGifts was introduced in a German or British magazine and that it grew rapidly, but I forget when.

1 year ago
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wow fist welcome winning 6 games in about a month is good going - and i have added you to my whitelist since you have started to giveaway some back to the site (doesn't mate what really anything is welcome in my book) - to be honest if all some people are joining the site are to take free games (win giveaways) and never chat or return the favour when possible - then i am glad the trend is on the lower side

1 year ago
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Thank you for your consideration.

1 year ago
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And a major decrease in bundles, and those left remaining, a large group usually complains about it.

1 year ago
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ngta gift game thừa từ bundle là chính, AAA chỉ có duy nhất 1 group Akatsuki là tặng thôi, nhắm đủ tiềm lực kinh tế thì xin join group đó

1 year ago
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Chào bác! Thỉnh thoảng lại gặp đồng hương.
Máy tôi cấu hình thấp nên cũng không quan tâm đến các game AAA lắm. Cảm ơn bác đã giới thiệu!

1 year ago
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