Why not giveaway free games for 0 points (no reputation for the creator)?

don't think it was suggested.
but whats the point? you can drop it in the forums and that's it...
more work for cg, for no reason

it has been proposed some times before. i think it will spend resources from the server for nothing.
you can drop keys for free games in the forum if you need to get rid of them.

It hangs the server as people spam giveaways with them. Just drop them keys on the forums.

Forums aren't bad but not perfekt.

First of all users have to know that forums are used for free games... and there is no automatically connection to your wishlist ...and the creator has to pick some winner by hand... and all the other drawbacks that motivated the creation of the giveaway system.

Summarized:
Do not give reputation for free giveaways but allow to use the well established giveaway system with all its benefits.

[edited topic title]

Better make free games visible in list of creation giveaway, but can't be picked. And add some info about "grey" games on page. But in the end would be very interesting with option create giveaway with random game, without any positive feedbacks for creator. But with limits just 1 slot with random game giveaway and with cost 30-50 point. Something like wheel of fortune. And people can put this free keys here.

Aside from the above mentioned issues, when games are free in large amounts, they tend to overwhelm the site, both in visual clutter and performance.

Those that have been around for a while remember times when the whole front page was nothing but Dota 2 beta or The Ship, and the site came to a crawl.

Also, the admin would have to manually change the price of the game and prevent it from updating from the Steam API, something he doesn't currently have a tool for.

Ok, thats a point. But without any reputation for those games i'm not sure if this would happen again.

Nevertheless i really like Bazilus suggestion - imho a typical low-hanging-fruit.
[...]Better make free games visible in list of creation giveaway, but can't be picked. And add some info about "grey" games on page[...]

Another point: people creating giveaways for a game X, the game X is a free game but the creator didn't realize about it. Creator sending ticket to support asking why he didn't get CV. Repeat that Y times daily. Yay for a support team even more saturated than before!

Hmm... but they would have to count towards giveaway feedback, right? I mean at least negative for sure. Some private groups scrutinize given:won ratio. Seems like it would be a bit of an ineloquent hack coding-wise to add a no-positive-feedback-only exception to free games.

If you view other giveaway sites that don't exclude free games you see them absolutely flooded with these giveaways, which unnecessarily strains the server and makes browsing the site a pain without filtering.

There is some merit to "free" games being added back on the site after their giveaway period has long passed. You could say that in order to avoid floods you could make it x weeks/months before a game can be given away without receiving credit, but if you then decide that after a much longer period these games can be given for bundle value again, you'd have to do another ugly hack that only counts value/feedback after a period of time that the game was marked as free.

Sounds like a good idea. The giveaway system is much more convenient and fair than leaving keys in the forum and letting the quickest user/bot/script snatch them.

If server resources becomes an issue it's always possible to revert this change.

You have my vote, if it means anything.

Vote on Facebook for a free game!

Enter these 5 mailing lists for a free game!

Register on our shady site for a free game!

Yeah, I'd be happy entering 1P or 0P giveaways for games I couldn't bother to get free myself. They would flood the list though, it would need an extra filter or sub-page.

I am probably against allowing free game giveaways. But I do wish there was a better way to give these keys out randomly, rather than post the keys in the forum. The ninjas on here are too damn good :-)

Yes. Mostly because most of the games blocked on SG aren't actually free anymore and some of us are sitting on actual giftable real life steam copies of such games and aren't allowed to give them away because that would be exploiting the system... Somehow....

And what about free games been give only if they're gifts?

I never seen free games been given in gifts [Only keys], neither a way to turn keys into gifts, and there's a lot of people who didn't get these games when they were free.