I used to use giveaways to drive traffic towards my steam group but it seems people who aren't in my steam group can't even see the giveaways, so it's not working :/. TBH this may have been previously available on the belated steam companion, rather than here.

Is there any way to make group giveaways publicly view-able? Or are they already viewable but somehow I'm doing it wrong.

7 years ago

Comment has been collapsed.

Make group recruitment topic ... or just make Public / Invite only giveaways with links to your group :)

Best way is to make a topic explaining what your group is about , and with a link to your group here in SG so ppl can see what is given away there ... pretty sure it will drive new members in ;P

And no , there isnt . Group only giveaways are viewable ONLY by group members .

7 years ago
Permalink

Comment has been collapsed.

Hmmm ... possibly.

7 years ago
Permalink

Comment has been collapsed.

Make sure there is some kind of tie-in to SG in your post. (Whether it's a giveaway you've included in the post, or the fact that your group uses SG to give games away, or something else.) That will make it relevant to SteamGifts instead of just being a random advertisement for a non-SG site.

7 years ago
Permalink

Comment has been collapsed.

Surely the link to the group giveaway on steamgifts might be a hint I do giveaways on steamgifts? :D

7 years ago*
Permalink

Comment has been collapsed.

Links to SG giveaways are considered relevant to SteamGifts, yes.

7 years ago
Permalink

Comment has been collapsed.

Just make public giveaways, and put the links to group-only giveaway, as well as a link to your group in the description of the public ones.

7 years ago
Permalink

Comment has been collapsed.

Not really the same though, is it? Unless it's a giveaway group, no one will bother.

7 years ago
Permalink

Comment has been collapsed.

Don't underestimate the click-bait of a giveaway. Public giveaways will give you exposure to whatever you put in the description of the giveaway, including information about your Steam group.

7 years ago
Permalink

Comment has been collapsed.

It's still not the same.

7 years ago
Permalink

Comment has been collapsed.

You do both; your group giveaway as usual, and a public (cheaper?) giveaway pointing to the group-only one.

7 years ago
Permalink

Comment has been collapsed.

It is still a very poor and complicated substitute compared to adding that extra feature.

7 years ago
Permalink

Comment has been collapsed.

That was one of the great features of SteamCompanion.

7 years ago
Permalink

Comment has been collapsed.

Too right.

7 years ago
Permalink

Comment has been collapsed.

Looks like I may be headed to gleam. At least that can drive views / follows towards my twitch/youtube accounts. :/ Shame.

7 years ago
Permalink

Comment has been collapsed.

The other issue is that you can't link the giveaway on facebook and just say "click here to enter". You have to say "join my steam group here, then join steamgifts here, then join the giveaway.

It would be far simpler / better if anyone could see the giveaway, then when they clicked to join it prompted them to login with steam/create a steam gifts account and then join the steam group if they weren't members. Of course not everyone would want this so they need to make it optional.

Similarly, users could select to filter out giveaways from groups to which they don't belong, if they like.

7 years ago*
Permalink

Comment has been collapsed.

Sounds like gleam might be what you need then, just be careful of where you advertise it - it's forbidden to post gleam links here (at least directly), and Valve doesn't seem to like them too much either.
But on the bright side, that would allow more people to enter, as to register on Steam Gifts you need to own $100 worth of unbundled games, while gleam doesn't have such strict limits.

7 years ago
Permalink

Comment has been collapsed.

If I'm recruiting for steam, there's no point in posting on steam ... or at least it's optional. Besides, it's easy enough to post a link to a facebook post on steam ... which contains a gleam giveaway.

7 years ago
Permalink

Comment has been collapsed.

Keep in mind that the purpose of SteamGifts is not to act as a billboard for the advertising of other sites. There are other websites that fulfill that function.

7 years ago
Permalink

Comment has been collapsed.

And thank goodness for that! (the first part)

7 years ago
Permalink

Comment has been collapsed.

Then they're missing out on potential giveaways.

Besides, i think you're wrong. Why have the "group recruitment" forum, where you can post such giveaways, if that's not part of this place's function?

7 years ago
Permalink

Comment has been collapsed.

The Group Recruitment node is for those Steam groups which use SteamGifts to give away games. . By contrast, you will not find my gaming clan advertising there as they have no connection with SteamGifts.

7 years ago
Permalink

Comment has been collapsed.

There are thousands of group giveaways going on at any point in time, and most of those groups are invite-only, I suspect. The number of unavailable giveaways one would have to sift through would make it highly undesirable to view giveaways from groups to which they don't belong. I suppose there's no downside to having the feature, though, provided the default is not to see these giveaways.

7 years ago
Permalink

Comment has been collapsed.

How would any giveaway be unavailable? Surely invite only groups would not make their giveaways visible? Surely you could filter out unavailable giveaways, like you can all others using steam gift settings?

7 years ago
Permalink

Comment has been collapsed.

I might have misunderstood your initial intention. But Steamgifts makes no distinction between group giveaways for groups that anybody can freely join, versus groups that require an invite. I do seem to recall that SteamCompanion (RIP) used to do that. So for Steamgifts, if group giveaways were visible (as I believe you were suggesting), then users would see tons of giveaways that are completely inaccessible.

7 years ago
Permalink

Comment has been collapsed.

That's true, but it could.

What you're saying is "let's not implement that feature because there are things which would need to be implemented to make it workable" O.o

7 years ago
Permalink

Comment has been collapsed.

I never said "let's not implement that feature," did I? I only said that, as it stands, if all group giveaways were visible, then that would be a lot of inaccessible giveaways to sort through...which is undesirable.

The alternative, of course, is to do it like Steam Companion-- have two types of group giveaways, "public" and "invite-only". I suspect this is a non-trivial enhancement, but it's not a bad one. If they ever went that route, I very much hope they'd make it so users can toggle off both types of group giveaways. I don't want to have to sift through a bunch of group giveaways, even if membership for those groups is open.

7 years ago
Permalink

Comment has been collapsed.

I said above that it should at least be up to the giveaway maker whether the givaway is visible to all, but you could force it to be invisible if the group is invite only.

7 years ago
Permalink

Comment has been collapsed.

Steamgifts would need to have a definitive way of knowing whether a group is invite-only. Maybe this is available via the Steam API, I don't know.

7 years ago
Permalink

Comment has been collapsed.

This isn't a bug.
Having people see giveaways they can't enter is not a good idea.
Use the group recruitment section.

7 years ago
Permalink

Comment has been collapsed.

So I can filter out giveaways I can't enter for other reasons. Are you saying that it would be impossible to allow users to filter out giveaways for groups to which they don't belong?

7 years ago
Permalink

Comment has been collapsed.

Are you saying that it would be impossible to allow users to filter out giveaways for groups to which they don't belong?

No. I never said anything about it being possible or not.
But most groups and their givs are private, so it wouldn't make sense to make them publicly visible.
The point is that there is already a mechanism for group recruitment and having that also done via advertising publicly-viewable but group-restricted giveaways is not good.

7 years ago
Permalink

Comment has been collapsed.

That wasn't the case on steamcompanion. I did say the option to keep giveaways private should also be in there. No one is talking about forcing anyone to do anything.

The majority of group giveaways on steamgifts are private. Well ... yes. I wonder if there's a contributing factor here.

7 years ago*
Permalink

Comment has been collapsed.

On top of that, making GAs for public groups visible to everybody will only lead to people joining these steam groups to participate in giveaways (and taking in account average user, it means to leech).
It is exactly what you want - to promote your groups or channels or whatever, but it will harm everybody else, for instance: public steam groups created by some particular interest, theme etc, probably not even having anything to do with SG and GAs generally. They don't need dead weight of leechers surprisingly incoming because of someone else occasionally creating gift giveaways for them.

So taking in account that this is not a promotional site, we don't need this feature.

7 years ago*
Permalink

Comment has been collapsed.

Sign in through Steam to add a comment.