Serious Question

i don't see the problem...?

Leechy leechers

Collectors, bots, addicts ;)
Also people who don't care what it is as long they get a +1 in their account
Edit: There may be 1% who actually want to try out the simulator games, apparently germany is a big market for them

Mostly auto-entry scripts, especially since you are doing level 0 ones. And there are quite a few users who enter everything they see. 3-500 entries for a 1-hour level 0 is quite normal.

So there I was, had accumulated a whole bunch of bundle trash so I do the standard 1 hour GA to get that crap pushed out as fast as possible.

did you really just say this and then complained about people who entered for this trash you wanted to get rid of as fast as possible? i mean, what do you care why people enter? you wanted it gone. it's not really worth anything. so who cares what happens with it...

bots, enjoy the new sg.

Who is actually playing these games?

Open the store page and take a look at reviews - there are at least 15 users, that played and reviewed that game, and at least 8 that bought it via steam store as a gift, so they had strong intention of spending money on that. If you assume that 10% of players are doing reviews, you'll have a number like 150, which seems quite decent.

On SG, I'd say that maybe 1/3 of that, so like 50 users actually wanted to try that title, mostly out of curiosity. Maybe they enjoy simulator games, maybe they want to check it out, or maybe steam store page convinced them. 50 number is absolute maximum, I always assume around 10% of entries to be people that want the game, and this is already too high for mixed bundled games, but still a nice assumption.

So what about the rest? People that join anything for +1. There are LOTS of them, actually people that are carefully joining giveaways are in minority - majority joins everything they can, of course assuming some efficiency so taking in account number of copies, entries, level and time, because points are finite (otherwise we'd have 10x that amount of entries in every giveaway).

Will your winner play your game? Unlikely. Will the winner be truly grateful for the win? Unlikely. Will you make somebody's day better at least by a tiny percent of +1 library? Very likely.

Of course it matters for people what they win, because everybody would like to win all upcoming AAA games, but people are also happy just to see that +1 win icon, and I'd probably join that game myself if I didn't own it already. I always suggest to avoid public giveaways if you care about your entries - even invite-only one yields to better results, while whitelisting people you like yields to best ones (for you, because that's the starting point). That however doesn't mean that we should stop making public giveaways altogether, but it's a good thing to be prepared for "incidents".

Main problem is that the great/wishlisted/AAA games get several thousand entries while the bundled crap gets couple hundred. So some don't want to waste their time entering thousands and probably getting nothing, when they can at least win something with the same effort. At least that's how I see it.

Rail Cargo Sim does not even have cards, so maybe game count or hours played accumulators?

46 friends already own this game:

0 have played it... =) (this pretty much says "collectors/+1'rs/me")

Like collecting is something bad!

I personally find it a bit strange when people that win games from me actually play them (;

I'll admit, I'll enter contests to win games that I'm only barely intersted in playing. Why not? At a 0.25% chance of winning, I'm not really going to end up with a ton of crap games, and if I get a tiny bit of fun or learn something about what genres I like and don't like, what's wrong with that?

And I don't have a traditional 9-5 job, so I'm often on SG on weird hours.