Because SG pulls its information from the Steam API, removed games drop to 0 CV once removed from the store, since they no longer have a retail price on the Steam store.
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Right, and that's why new giveaways for these games give 0 CV.
But shouldn't you keep the CV you've gained from such games if your giveaway has ended long before the removal of the games from the store? Until now that's at least what I was thinking would happen.
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doesnt work like that because the admin cant code the extra functionality into the site, that would maintain the last cv listed if it gets removed from steam.
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He could keep a daily updated database (which steamgifts uses to apply CV to giveaways) which contains a list of all the games that are given away. If a game in the next daily update shows up with 0 CV it gets automatically checked if it's now F2P and if it turns out to be deleted from steam, the price doesn't get updated. This would to the trick I guess.
Closing the topic now since the issue is explained by the informaiton given by AllTracTurbo.
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CV is calculated with the current game price, so no store page, no price, no CV.
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Really... ok. So, I guess that should be changed by keeping the last price in steamgifts own database?
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Maybe cg has reasons to do it like that, I don't know.
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Well, according to AllTracTurbo's reply games' last prices get updated to the last price manually as soon as someone gets to it.
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I knew that sometimes prices get updated manually (my first support ticket 4 years ago was about Metro 2033, it was 20p instead of 15p, so bobfatt put a request in the admin's queue to adjust it.) but I didn't know for removed games.
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Well, there's something new to learn every day...
JFYI, I'm closing the topic.
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I thought I remember reading a long time ago that remove games give 0 CV, but only until someone manually adds the last price to SG. Then you get the correct value based on what the price use to be. That is what I remember reading somewhere, but I could be wrong.
Edit: Here is a comment from 3 years ago. The user is support now, not sure if they were back then.
Another
Another
Change Log July 3, 2017 - Updates to how we sync game prices with Steam, which should result in games keeping their value when they're removed from the Steam store, instead of changing to zero value.
Another from TempeteJoachim
You may want to read these more recent comments here and here. It looks like SG can only set the price if the game is fully removed from Steam.
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Ok, so that would mean in such a case it's only a matter of time until an admin finds the time to update the game's info in the database. This would render my suggestion as obsolete. Would be nice if someone could confirm this before I close the topic.
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Ok, according to the change log entry I would assume that this happens automatically. It didn't though, also for other games that got pulled earlier this or last week. So I would guess there's something wrong and this is a bug.
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I just added 2 more links to the end of my comment. They are more recent and talk about how SG can only add the last value of the game if it is completely removed from Steam. It seems like purchase disabled games will stay at 0 CV as long as the game has a Steam page.
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One would believe you'd get the CV of the game at the time of the giveaway though. If I were to give away a brand new AAA game released today, why should the CV drop if the game is given away for free 5 years later? (or has its price reduced)
EDIT because can't reply to the replies: I get that the CV won't drop for past giveaways if given away for free, but what I'm saying is the CV at the time of the giveaway should be the one you keep, so if a AAA title is at $60 when you give it away that's what you get even if its price is reduced to $5 a few years later.
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why should the CV drop if the game is given away for free 5 years later?
It doesn't, in that case. If you've given the game away prior to it being given away free (assuming we're talking about something like Humble Bundle's current giveaways?), your CV remains unchanged.
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You just said it: The CV would drop (only for new giveaways though!) because it's price got (most likely) reduced by then.
The more important question would be: What if an AAA title gets pulled from the steam store (such as some Ubisoft titles if I remember correctly), would CV previously earned for these games be removed as well?
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Everyone's CV is calculated based on the current full retail price in US dollars no matter when you created the giveaway. The only difference is if you receive full, reduced, or no CV based on if you created your giveaway when the game was unbundled, bundled/heavily reduced price (usually around 95%), or free.
If the game is bundled, everyone that made a giveaway previous to the bundle date keeps the full value CV and everyone after gets 15%. If the game is given for free, everyone previous keeps their full/reduced values and all the new giveaways forever after get nothing (sometimes games will be removed from the free list, but it is rare). Since all the calculations are based on the current price, if the game was $40 when you gave it away and they permanently reduce the price to $20, now you only get $20 CV. The full CV users would get $20 instead of $40 and the reduced would get $3 instead of $6.
From what I just read from other people's comments, if the game is purchase disabled on Steam, everyone will get $0 CV no matter when you gave the game away and everyone will stay at $0 for as long as the game is on Steam, but cannot be purchased. If the game is fully removed form the Steam store, not just purchase disabled, you can create a ticket and support can add the last price to the SG server and it will correctly calculate everyone's CV again based on the last price before it was removed.
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Which was clear by now after the information you've supplied in your other comments. Thanks, again.
Closing the topic now.
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I've noticed that my level is slightly lower than yesterday by, I don't know exactly, 20-50 real CV I guess. Wondering what might have caused this I've checked the list of games recently marked as bundled but couldn't find anything that would explain this. I went ahead and checked my last 150 giveaways and it seems like a few of the games I have given away in the past have been removed from the steam store.
Now with bundled games it's known, that CV gets removed retroactively if the giveaway started after the day of the game being first bundled. But how about games that are removed from the store? Unfortunately I couldn't find anything on this.
I thought that the contributor level was not affected when games are removed from the store (or bundled or given away in a mass giveaways) after our giveaway has already ended? Especially if our giveaways have ended weeks or months before the removal? Or is this a database error? I'm confused.
I don't mind too much about my level but am merely interested in understanding what happened there and to point out - in case I'm right with my assumptions - that there's indeed something wrong with the database.
Maybe someone knows more about the issue and can shed some light on it?
EDIT:
According to Asulf, once a game is removed from the steam store, we lose the CV gained from doing giveaways of such games. I'd like to suggest to keep the last known price of such games in steamgifts' database to prevent this from happening, to follow the same rules that apply to newly bundled or games that get categorized as 0 CV games.
EDIT 2: According to information gathered and supplied by AllTracTurbo, it seems like users will get previously gathered CV for newly removed games only after these games are fully deleted from the steam store and after the steamgifts staff has added the last known value of the games back to steamgifts database manually.
So it seems that this is how things go, therefore I close this topic.
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