Unofficial SteamGifts.com FAQ

Hey community,

I have seen a lot of questions here that were answered in this thread.

I thought I would copy and paste some of the answers, if there wasn't already plans for an official sticky yet.

• How are the winners chosen?

The winners are randomly selected. There's a cron job running every 5 minutes, checking for closed giveaways that need winners assigned. Since giveaways end by default on a 5 minute mark, the winners should be instantly selected.

• Nice idea, but is this legal? I don't want Steam shutting down my account just because I participated in a giveaway.

I've gifted 50 or 60 games to people around the world throughout the past year, and I've never had an issue with Steam. Obviously, that's only my experience, but I don't see why Valve would have any complaints with the site. It's simply helping people find a way to share their extra copies. It's not setup to dodge country restrictions or pricing, but just a friendly community. If anything, I'd like to get game publishers or even Valve involved.

• So what's stopping a user from simply entering every giveaway on the site?

At the moment, nothing. In the future we could always introduce some features that would allow someone creating a giveaway to specify the max entries, the maximum number of giveaways a participant is allowed to have entered in the past month, their minimum contributions to the site, etc.

• I don't know it feels like there should be some kind of benefit for hosting giveaways, but that kind of goes against the /playitforward mindset. Maybe if you've hosted lots of giveaways and there's a game you really want up for grabs you can enter that giveaway twice (or more)?

I was thinking in the future, giveaway creators could set the minimum amount of contributions, before someone is allowed to enter. So you could easily say, only users who have contributed $20, or $50 worth of giveaways are able to join.

• I would like to sign up and even throw up a few giveaways myself, but to be honest i'm a little wary.. What's to say you won't just steal my steam account details? and the account game valuing also puts me off a little, can someone convince me otherwise?

I also run SteamGameSales.com and Tf2Store.com, and they both use the same login system with tens of thousands of registered members. When you login, Steam responds with...

http://steamcommunity.com/openid/id/12345678912345678

Where the number represents your 64bit Steam ID (public information). Although the site is extremely secure, if it was ever hacked, and all the database information compromised, you would still be safe, because the only information I know or save is public data. Account value is pulled from your public Steam profile, comparing your list of games, with current list prices in the Steam store.

Steam OpenID Information

http://steamcommunity.com/dev/

SteamGameSales stickied on their forum for tracking sales and price reductions.

http://forums.steampowered.com/forums/showthread.php?t=518670

If you have any other hesitations, let me know.

• What are the requirements to join SteamGifts.com?

We require all registered users to have at least $30.00 worth of games associated with their Steam account. This is to prevent users from creating multiple Steam accounts for use on this site, which might result in cheating. Currently your account is valued at $29.96. If you believe this was an error, please contact us.

From Steam Support:

• How can I tell if my friend already owns one of these games?

If you are sending a gift directly through Steam, users who already own this game will automatically be filtered out of the potential list of recipients. You could always just ask to make sure as well.

If you are positive that they do not have this game, you can send it to their email. Users who already have a subscription to a gift they’ve received will not be able to activate it on their existing account.

I hope this helps some people out with their questions.