Theres a reason this site exists. Im awaiting lots of comments saying your slandering the site however although i have never noticed that developer giveaways are "fixed" its understandable to let contributes or developers have a better chance of winning although this may be unfounded.I have given away a few different games and my contributor status is almost $60.00 and i have yet to win anything over the $10 mark and never a tradable game may i add (only keys).It maybe should be capped or developers disallowed to win high value games.
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It doesn't just the order of winning 5 game keys including 2 betas and entering 1,693 entries during my lifetime and entering contributor only over a certain amount on paper may increase my chances of winning however the powers that be have not allowed that.
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My second win was a tradeable copy of Railworks 3 Haulin' USA pack. At that point I had only given away Portal, an indie bundle game, and maybe one other small non-bundle game. In total I probably had 30-40 dollars worth of contrib value at that time.
Your argument is invalid.
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I think the issue that jatan11t is trying to say is that its somewhat annoying that developers seem to be winning over any other entity on the site.Is this unjust?
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No, what he's saying is, after a dev does a large giveaway, they have thousands of dollars in contributor value which allows them to enter in giveaways requiring a very large value... Which is potentially unfair to those with high contributor values that actually paid for the games they gave away.
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The reason i never commented about the contributor points is that i thought it might be capped as mines is at 300.
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Those are the points you enter the giveaways with and they have nothing to do with contributing to the site.
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I welcome the debate on this but I believe it has absolutely no merit in having this debate.
Foregoing 50 or 1000 keys to your game is a huge amount of goodwill in my book and we shouldn't condemn or limit any potential 'benefits' some of the devs might get.
It seems ludicrous to propose that some dev sits there thinking 'You know what, i'll make a game. I'll make a gift just to give it away on steam gifts and get a higher chance of games.'
I thank all the devs who have participated in giving away keys to there games through this site and I encourage more to do so.
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The problem is that sometimes it's not an actual dev that is giving away the keys, it's a third-party user that is representing the dev, like say a press member.
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How is that a problem?
Steam gifts is simple and basic, you give something away and let random people enter a raffle.
^ attaching any more strings to that really does complicate things. Tons of gifts here, i'd say maybe 50% or higher [I wish we had some kind of script to verify this] are won by people who won't either enjoy the game, play the game or will play it for a very very short period of time.
I remember someone who won prototype from me and they played it for like 20 mins if I recall. [they won it like a year ago] Likewise I have also won things and not played very much of it, which is generally why I don't enter giveaways now.
If someone approaches a dev on behalf of a community, then kudos to them and they deserve whatever they can get from it. Like your press member scenario.
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Except dev giveaways are immune to that, thus why we've had dev giveaways for betas (eg. Guns of Icarus Online) and greenlight games (eg. Oniken).
It's not as black and white as you're making it out to be.
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There have been plenty of beta developer giveaways. And I assure you that the creators were never suspended.
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Lol, that's what he's saying. Say a rep of a game dev comes here, gives away 1000 beta keys (because they are OK in dev giveaways) and then has $10000 of contributor value.
They didn't give that out of their own pocket, but now they can enter any giveaway on the site. Fair?
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Then there are the always changing 'abused' games. Which, mostly, are keys given for free. Oh wait, devs don't pay themselves for the keys they give away, therefore they are free, and should be treated as a user giving away similarly 'abused' games. By the way, giving such large amounts of games away for a company for 'advertising purposes' turns into HUGE tax write offs. Therefore, devs are MAKING money by giving keys away.
So the ideal of a simple and basic system is horribly disfigured by such additions to the rules and the end result for certain parties.
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'My first thought "Hello deumas"...'
Look at the basis for almost all of his wins. They are either through private links or through being part of private groups. He'd have acquired almost all of those without giving away 1000 keys to NS2.
Like I said this is a pointless debate and potentially could harm the goodwill intent of giving away keys. Don't forget they don't have to do it. A ton of other mediums exist, such as facebook, twitter and all the rest as a means of giving things away and in my opinion generating more hype than this site.
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A dev doing giveaways for publicity/marketing purposes shouldn't turn around and try to win single copies of games off of the community.
Giveaways are meant for individual users of the site, not a business account to come in and win them.
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Ah, but they don't pay for those games, unlike the people who give away a bunch of $0.16 mispriced games, or accidentally free Ubisoft or EA games, or exploitable free promo game, or... Oh, wait... Never mind.
On one hand, it can be a bit annoying. On the other hand, people are making these exclusive high dollar contributor status giveaways. Someone with a high dollar contributor status is thus going to win them. If you want more variety in who wins high contributor giveaways, the solution may be to reduce the barrier to entry, not to tell specific high contributors that they aren't allowed.
This does drift into bundle giveaway territory, though. And the site does place limits on the contributor value of bundle games and some exploited games. But then again, I don't believe it does anything to a title that might temporarily be given a legitimate steep reduction for a sale.
It doesn't affect me either way, as I cannot enter high contributor giveaways in the first place. However, that those developer giveaways exist does affect me, and affects everyone else as well. And most people would probably rather maintain more chances to win more games than worry about not letting a very few specific people into giveaways that only a few specific people are allowed to enter.
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Good point about developer giveaways getting into bundle territory. Betas definitely shouldn't count. Those are just for testing, publicity and bug identification.
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I'm not too sure on it honestly.
However I am 100% sure that the devs that do the beta giveaways should NOT be towards their contribute thing.
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I'm not whining. In fact, I can't even enter the giveaways that I'm referring to.
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What does it matter? Regardless of "Who", that member that is the "Dev giveaway representative" ARE giving away all those games, so they've earned their contributor value.
Whats the worst that happens? This member will win games more often than others? Weigh that against how many games they are giving away. They've earned it in my opinion.
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A rep is giving away keys that the dev game them, it's hardly a contribution as they didn't pay for the keys.
In fact, the rep may have been paid by the dev already to promote the game.
Since dev giveaways need to be manually setup, the best solution would be to set the giveaway to be a 0P entry. That way it has no point cost to enter and the value would be Zero X (amount of copies).
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Regardless, that rep (Representative. As in, they represent the Developers) was sanctioned by the Devs. X amount of games are still being given out to this community from this generous source. So 1000 games are given, because its not the exact devs, they should be denied Contributor value?
Its a situation of "Who gives a F***". Is it really that big a problem that one of these "Reps" has extremely high Contributor Value, when weighed against the dozens to thousands of games they've given away? If I gave out 1000 games, would you be upset at my contributor value? Of course not. Whichever account they choose to execute their giveaway, and whoever owns that account, is THEIR business.
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A dev doing giveaways for publicity/marketing purposes shouldn't turn around and try to win single copies of games off of the community.
Giveaways are meant for individual users of the site, not a business account to come in and win them.
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Accounts that make developer giveaways should not be able to enter giveaways. Considering this is "Steam Gifts" and some developers giveaways have been for non steam games as well as betas which may only last a couple days, those who make developer giveaways should not be allowed to enter giveaways simply because the opportunity for exploitation is present. The developers are choosing to giveaway the games because they believe it is worth the PR, and side benefits like instant "elite contribution levels" do no more than slightly undermine the entire point of the site.
Of course, the admins could be letting this happen because they think it draws developer giveaways. From what I've seen those taking advantage are 3rd party people that are given the copies to giveaway. Perhaps the "site advantage" is what compels them to offer this service free of charge. Regardless, if they want this site to be seen as one of integrity, they should not be offering this sly deal. They should close the hole.
You could say, betas shouldn't get full credit but full games should. That is really just over complicating the matter. It is known that the site is understaffed, so why complicate their job even more?
So yeah developer giveaways. They should either give zero contribution. Or just ban accounts that make developer giveaways from entering giveaways again.
I'm pretty sure all contests that are respectable include such provisions. I really don't see why it isn't already implemented, unless like I said it's some sort of strategy by the site management to encourage more developer/publicity-agent giveaways.
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100% agree on all points. The core reason why developers give away games is for PR and brand building, which will hopefully attract big name developers in the future.
Given their commercial objectives, the developer accounts and the accounts of the individual should be separated.
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I agree. Either developer accounts should not be allowed to enter giveaways, or developer giveaways should not count towards contributor value. Developers already get free advertising from the giveaways, and that's worth much more than contributor value.
What's more, I'm pretty sure no one here has a button that just creates more keys to giveaway like developers do.
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So you want to punish people who give members of this site a thousand copies of their own games for free, because it is just too much for them to get an equal chance with other people to win a few games?
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I'm not sure on this one. Part of me thinks that they should be free to do as they please, given their contribution to the site, but you could also argue that this is an abuse of their position in the company, particularly when the "games" in question are simply beta keys.
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Developers should either not be allowed to make giveaways, or developer giveaways should not count towards contributor value. It's not fair to other people since they can literally just give away as many copies as they want. They can even add more copies after a giveaway has started. Sure, half of the people here haven't paid for half of the games they've contributed, but they can't just hit a button to get more copies of a game to give away. What's more, the developers actually get free advertising from it, which is worth a LOT more than contributor value.
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Developers help make steamgifts such a great site and I am very thankful to them. I have, however, noticed multiple people winning high contributor giveaways with contributions mainly coming from these developer giveaways #. Reading a couple of previous threads, it seems that this behavior should not be allowed. Surely this is more exploitative than the game I am giving away #. Food for thought?
X#X#X
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