Giveaways for previously free games would be great, I know a lot of people wish they could make/enter giveaways for Dark Souls: Prepare to Die Edition. I myself would love to see some giveaways for Hover: Revolt of Gamers, since it's almost impossible to get that game in trades these days (there's less then a dozen active users between both steamtrades and barter.vg that even have it anymore!).
I also think when making a giveaway their should be an info box which lets the user know if the game has been bundled before and what actual amount of CV they'll be getting from it will be. This would be helpful to newcomers who don't yet understand that the posted cv isn't the 'real' cv.
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Happy and safe Holidays to you and your loved ones CG! :3
Thank you for the continued support for your site and I hope the new support members will be well thought over and get a background check before getting accepted to the support team.
Free games shouldn't get any CV at all.
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Thank you, cg! A lot of really nice ideas up there. Some numbers are really incredible (3k GAs per day :O) Won't add much now, you are on the right way anyway :D Happy Holidays!
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Allowing Giveaways for Previously Free Games
No CV and a completely separate section for them. It's the only thing that makes sense.
Thanks for all the work cg :)
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No CV and a completely separate section for them. It's the only thing that makes sense.
You've got that right! :3
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Sounds like some good changes are coming! I like the giveaways for free games part. Euro Truck Simulator 2 being a game that is a good example of the advantages of allowing that. I'd suggest a cool down period however, like a one month block of the game, to prevent dozens of the same game giveaways at once. Or maybe a limit to the maximum amount of giveaways that can be made for a game per period, like Indiegala does.
Happy holidays!
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or just as suggested before - separate section for free GAs ;) This way they will not flood main GA page if you're not intrested in them, but if you missed a promo and really want this free game you can take advantage of said flood in separate section to have better chances to win what you missed ;)
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Still I would argue that a cool down period would be better; imagine there is some active giveaway for a game, allowing the creation of a giveaway for it would be pointless (since you can grab the keys somewhere else for free) and it might cause a flood with many of the same games (although you can just blacklist a game if you don't want it). As for the separate section, I can only speak for myself, but a game is a game, I don't like to discriminate between free/bundle/unbundled games. Once it is not freely obtainable anymore (being in a bundle or free) it gets a (higher) value. It doesn't matter that someone got it for free or in a bundle, because since I cannot get it this way anymore, I'm happy they are willing to give it away.
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First of all - it would not be pointless, because some people may for whatever reason not want or even be unable to enter. People may not be willing to perform required actions in free GA - like clicking reflinks. People may not have required accounts (like social media accounts which may be required to gleam/woobox GA, or don't have FB account while GA happens through Facebook app), people may not live in GA supoported region (just a few gAs there was a free GA announced at forums which was locked to NA region only), people may be browsing on smartphone and many GA apps do not work on older smartphones. There are countless reasons why these GAs can be useful even if main GA is still running.
Secondly - you wouldn't have to BlackList them and they would not flood you even if there were thousands of them. They would be put in separate "Free" Section, unless you went to this section you wouldn't even notice them, even if there were thousands of them. And such a section is not discrimination of any kind, it's just a way to avoid a flood. Is separate sections for Trade topics discrimination? These are topics after all! No it's not, there is simply a special section for these kinds of topics and there would be a special section for Free games.
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So since some people are not willing to or cannot preform these tasks, you want other people to grab ("farm") the keys and put them on SteamGifts? That sounds unfair to the giver that is giving them away (even if they want Social Media as 'payment'). It will happen for sure (hence the very low or no CV reward is needed), but I'd like to go from the point where people ideally only grabbed one copy for them selves.
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as long as they get nothing at all from it (they don't get CV, they don't get slots, they don't get # sent, they don't get these gAs listed on their main profile page) - yes, why not. If they are willing to waste their time over and over to do nothing let them do it. The free for all system is already not fair to giver - people already can take multiple keys for reselling, trading, alt activation and card farming and so on and on. So I don't see how SG would make things any different from giver's perspective. It's not like something like this will only start to happen of we allow free game gifting on SG. It's already happening without SG and I really believe you are overestimating SG's impact compared to places like reddit or trading/selling platforms :D:
Also like I said - it's not only cases of people not willing to do something to enter GA, there are cases of people not being able to enter GA at all even if they wanted to (geolocked GAs, or some countries blocking certain social pages - GL entering FB GA if you happen to live in country which blocks FB totally for example).
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You cannot really compare SG to these. SG primary focus is private gifting (ofc we get some "big" GAsm but there are max few of them per day compared to mentioned by SG 3300 private GAs (in meaning done by private person, not Private GA) per day. Plus it's hard to compare thousands-hundreds of thousands copies to usual SG featured GAs. It's not really the same thing to buy game yourself and give it to others and being a company and giving away hundreds of thousands of keys as a PR action or to generate cards (not to mention that in 2nd case company don't care who gets it and how many he gets as long as he farms and sells cards ;p). I do get your point but at the same time - what stops these companies from setting up GAs in a way that either prevents or amkes getting multiple keys hard (look at orlygift for example - where you can have 1 account or get banned, you gotta activate key as well or get banned, they could use IP banning and so on and on). The truth is that in most cases it doesn't matter to them if it's 10 ppl getting 1 key of 1 person getting 10 keys. It matters to you - to them there is in many cases no difference. All 10 copies gonna be used to farm and sell cards them getting Steam Cut. They will still get 10 more likes to their FB profile, 10 retweets and follows boosting their Social Media stats, it doesn't matter if these will be from 10 different ppl using 10 different accounts or one person using 10 accounts. Both cases will boost their social medias by exactly same number. And so on and on. Only real losers are end users like you and me - because we get lesser chance to get game ourselves, so I like you do not like it when ppl do it and I end up not getting key for game I didn't have, but like I said - from creator perspective there is no difference, and idf there was a difference and they wanted to fight it they could simply do things the way I mentioned earlier.
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I'm very glad to see these updates! You have been working hard on the website and its showing! Thank you very much for all the hard work, CG! Merry Christmas! :3
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Hey, happy holidays and thanks for this post.
I'd like to change the way we look at those games in the future, and allow users to give them away with a highly reduced CV, or no CV.
I think "no CV" would be the only option. Even a single cent of CV would most likely encourage some folks to hoard free games and dramatically reduce the quality of the giveaways. Even now we have a lot of bundle game giveaways and only a few non bundled ones, which is fine, because just because a game is bundled doesn't mean it's bad game - often it's quite the contrary. Now with free games, that may be true as well, but let's not forget there's a quite a few titles which are free for a reason. Also, you'd have to make sure, that the website can handle the additional traffic caused by giving away free games.
The idea is simple; replace our advertisements with a Patreon page to raise donations
As far as I am concerned, I wouldn't replace them entirely, I'd add that Patreon page, in addition to the advertisements or maybe reduce the advertisements a bit - that's if they can be reduced, I don't think there's a lot of advertisement on this page anyway. I'm saying this because I don't mind the ads in their current form, even find them informative in some cases. With most websites I tend to use an adblocker, but not with SG. If ads pay for keeping this place running along with donations, I don't think it's a bad thing. As I said, in rare cases I even find some of the ads interesting enough to click them.
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Also, you'd have to make sure, that the website can handle the additional traffic caused by giving away free games.as cg mentioned We could likely double our traffic with our current Infrastructure, and reach 5x or 10x our traffic with 20 minutes of downtime to scale our database server. - if free games section would be separate from main GAs page I doubt it would even increase site traffic 5 or 10 times because only people who missed some free promo and really wanted some particular game would go there. If anything I'd say free games section would see less traffic than main GAs section does atm (considering GAs in free section still cost points to enter), and since traffic on SG is not generated only by GAs but also forums and trades, I doubt we'd even see 50% increase in traffic, so it should not be a problem ;)
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Thanks for the post on what to look out for in 2017. Merry Christmas to you and your loved ones.
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sure, good idea I can agree with. It should be free, give no advantage, maybe even still cost to enter so ppl just don't spam entering everything and so we don't promote autoscript usage even more. So paid to enter, give no benefits, can be in separate category - just give ppl who wan't to give for nothing in return do so and give people who want these games still get them.
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how would it become GameMiner 2? GM from the very start had a system where you paid for a better chance to win better games. Here it's said from the begginign that it will never give any advantage. How can you compare these two and call them the same? Simply because both offer payment?
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first step to what? This way you can say we shouldn't make any changes at all, because you can exaggerate said changes to some untold extremum (any change) and say "yeah, it's not exactly the same, But it's just first step! Second step will be counting bundle games full value. Third step will be requiring 0$ Value and allowing 0 games profiles. But won't it allow multiaccounts? Sure, so Fourth step will be acceptance of multiaccounts. Fith gonna be allowing these multiaccounts to use autojoin scripts and become bots farming all GAs. Sixth step gonna be no fair user being able to win anything because there are 3 billion bot accounts on SG! According to your definition counting bundle games as reduced value is the same as allowing billions of bot alt accounts to autowin all GAs on SG. Because in some extreme circumstances 1st is the first step to 2nd ;p
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Thank you cg for an update on the future of steamgifts and happy holidays if you happen to read it :)
Steamgifts is one of the few sites that I have whitelisted in my adblocker. I for one welcome the change from ads to semi-direct donation via Patreon or otherwise.
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Thank you so much, and happy holidays!
I'd love for there to be a Patreon option, with no benefits to the donators. I'd donate $ in a second.
In fact, LMK if there's a way I can donate directly prior to a Patreon option.
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Hey SG, happy holidays, I hope everyone is having a great weekend! It's been a good year for SteamGifts, and we've seen a lot of growth in terms of giveaways. Although there's still a week remaining, I think this December might turn into our highest month on record for giveaway activity, averaging over 3,300 giveaways per day. However, we still have room to improve, and I'd like to see a few changes to our site in early 2017. I'll talk about a few of those now, and I look forward to the community feedback before I start implementing any of them.
Plans
Support
There's been a number of discussions lately asking why tickets are taking longer to answer, and users wondering why we have not yet expanded our team of volunteers to help with the demand. I'm aware of the need for more support, and it's going to be my highest priority going into 2017. The issue with simply expanding our team is the lack of documentation for the wide variety of tickets and edge cases new team members would face. Consistency is an area we still struggle with today when answering tickets. The majority of tickets we face are not simply black and white, and even the most basic of questions, such as, "What's considered an inappropriate comment?", can be a challenge to answer and moderate consistently. I'm in the process of improving our documentation with the help of our volunteers, and writing a set of standard operating procedures to help guide us when answering tickets. Once finished, we'll be able to more efficiently add new members to our team, bring them up to speed faster, and be more confident when handling tickets. Personally, I'd like to see another 5-10 users join our team early 2017, and then further expand again in the months that follow.
Allowing Giveaways for Previously Free Games
I've seen this suggestion show up a few times in the discussions section, and it's one I'd like to implement. As you know, when a game is free, we typically pull it from our game list. This means if a developer briefly distributes their game for free, or if a user gives away thousands of keys on another site, the corresponding game can no longer be given away on SteamGifts. At the moment, it's unfortunate for users that miss those opportunities, since our site does not provide them with a second chance to obtain a copy of the game. We also receive quite a few tickets from users with previously free games, that simply want to find them a home. I'd like to change the way we look at those games in the future, and allow users to give them away with a highly reduced CV, or no CV. I think it'll provide users with more flexibility in terms of what they give away, and it'll provide everyone with a chance to win some great games we've unfortunately removed from our game list.
Notifications
I think e-mail notifications will be a good method of increasing overall engagement on our site in the upcoming year. They could provide users with the option to be notified when games on their wishlist are being given away, or when featured giveaways are posted for games they don't own. Notifications would be easy to subscribe or unsubscribe to with a single click, and not only would they help to grow our site, I think they would be a valuable tool for less active users that don't have the time to check our site daily.
Patreon
This is one idea I go back and forth on frequently, but you might see it tested in 2017. The idea is simple; replace our advertisements with a Patreon page to raise donations. I think the concept of being directly funded by our users would better fit with the spirit of our community, and it would help to separate us from advertising networks, which grow more invasive on a regular basis. If we do ever implement a donation system, it would be entirely optional, and no giveaway or point advantages would ever come to those that donate.
Challenges
User Registration
Looking at our stats, it's easy to see we have less users registering per month, and you might assume this means a drop in activity. However, that's not the case. Our bundle list grows daily, and since we exclude bundle games when calculating registration value, it's becoming more and more difficult for new users to register. It's normal for us to see 75% of users unable to register on a typical day. This is a difficult problem to solve. On one hand we need strict requirements to protect our community against users signing up multiple accounts, and on the other hand, we don't want to block hundreds of legitimate users from registering each day. If anyone has any thoughts on improving this system, please share.
Infrastructure
If you've been a member for a few years, you likely remember the days of slow load times and frequent downtime. We've come a long way since then, and I think in 2016 our site has been reliable and responsive. There's been quite a few updates focused on improving performance during the past year. As well, we have a good backup solution in place with our daily, client-side encrypted backups being stored outside of our servers. Last but not least, we have room to grow. We could likely double our traffic with our current Infrastructure, and reach 5x or 10x our traffic with 20 minutes of downtime to scale our database server. Overall, I think it's one area we're finally doing well.
Thanks to everyone for being a part of SteamGifts this year, and a special thanks to our volunteers for answering tickets and helping to support our community!
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