GA Statistics for SG

Region restriction was the initial huge blow, been trending downward ever since. Deals aren’t as good as they once were, and the site simply aging accounts for the rest of the decline.

Nothing lasts.

No, steam just "tightens the screws"
They forbade keeping gifts in inventory. They introduced regional restrictions. They forbade giving gifts between regions if the price is different.
Soon they will ban, in principle, giving gifts. Then the keys will be banned. Then they will be banned from buying games. And then they will be forbidden to play)))

In my opinion the reason is the decline of bundles. We used to have a lot of good and buyworthy bundles in a week. Now we have the same amount in a months time. Many of them filled with repeats.

Some possible reasons.

1. Cocaine prices are on the rise.
2. You can't buy games for giveaways if your parents make you move out of the basement.
3. Trump.
4. "Scamdevs" constantly trying to trick me into sending money to them in Nigeria.
   4.a. Nigerian princes trying to get me to send money to "scamdevs."
5. Mail order brides cost a lot to ship, especially with the rise in tariffs. Buy American!
6. It's hard to make giveaways if your hands are covered in lube all the time.
7. Autojoin just went F2P (cosmetic-only microtransactions).
8. Thanos snapped his fingers and half of all giveaways were deleted. (Should I spoiler that?)
9. Brussels sprouts suck. Yeah, it's irrelevant, but worth mentioning.

waxing of GAs

Don't you mean waning? 😏

It's a downward trend, yes, but one that started long ago, and is constantly exacerbated by more-or-less unpredictable events.

What started it all were, no doubt, Steam's ever tightening restrictions on gifting.
First they started with region restrictions, because you could get gifts from cheap regions (RU/CIS, LATAM) for a fraction of the price you'd pay in the EU/USA.

Then, since you could still get gifts from cheap ROW countries like Canada and New Zealand, they added pricing restrictions, allegedly in a move to hinder trading, but that ultimately didn't do much, since you could still stock up gifts during sales to trade/resell later... so they eventually removed inventory gifts altogether.

Needless to say, that did more harm to regular users than to traders and resellers, as they still have plenty of ways to do their business, while you can't do much if you're stuck with Steam Wallet... especially if they ban you from using it on gifting, because, yes, they do that as well.

Now you cannot reliably use sales for giveaways anymore, as you have to match sale length and giveaway length, while also trying to safeguard yourself against 1) the 1-week grace period for winners, 2) public users' tendency to use bots/scripts and only show up in person once per week, 3) the not too rare possibility of a language barrier.

Then, add to that the downward trend in bundle quality, due to publishers not wanting their games to end up in grey markets for pennies.
Which leaves grounds open for... less than reputable publishers, the likes of which you often find mentioned here and/or here given some time.

There's also fewer freebies lately, and while not worth any CV, they do contribute to raw numbers... and still help patch them up, they'd be smaller otherwise.

Next up, Humble Bundle's schizophrenic policies about gifting (that coincidentally started after IGN took over), which they like to equate to trading/reselling, and use as an excuse to refuse help at best, banning accounts at worst, hiding behind their vague Terms of Service and the USA's notoriously pro-corporate laws.

And to top it all, a pandemic-induced global economic crysis, cutting even deeper into the spending ability of those whose pockets were already tight to begin with.
Long story short, there's less money to spend (if any is left at all), less stuff to spend it on, and fewer ways to spend it the way you want.
And those who do buy bundles, might be more inclined to sell or trade their leftovers to earn something, rather than give them away for free.

Last, but not least, from a gifting perspective, the death of Tremor Games, still mourned after 2 years and half, dealt a massive blow to the already declining activity.
The period of transition between the end of 2018 and early 2019 saw the number of giveaways decline from a steady 50-60k monthly to barely 30-40k.

There's also, more than likely, lowered interest in the site, 10 years old next month, due to the aging userbase (less time to spend online when you've got work and/or a family), with newer members often plagued by the economic woes described above... or just here to leech because they saw this advertised as "a place to get free games" on some shady forum (wonder why so many newcomers seem to not have a clue about rules? I doubt they talk about "meaningless stuff" like rules there).

I might add the GA groups with a handful of members exchanging their gifts among themselves (which is a circle jerk in my view) don't help to make the site more attractive either.

Stats - Community - Giveaways 👀 Hmm..
When talking about this kind of thing, there are always people who talk with "experience" or "sixth sense", so I will attach a link.🔮

Per Type
See the popularity of different giveaway types per month.

From the beginning of this year, we have created Lv0 gifts for public GA in about a month.
Every month.
I've included something to educate you about how to use [SG Tools] and the percentage of users who violate the rules.
It seems that the number of SGtools users has increased not a little, and the move to GA using "Invita" has begun.

It seems that fraudsters, multiple accounts, and BOTs that violate the rules are also being suspend in sequence.
It will slowly move in the right direction.

Xbox Game Pass... and others services like that.

Recently,the games i had given, became free and my lvl dropped,so cuz of the fear that it may happen again,i am not making any giveaways.

Users with mature steam accounts ( 5k+ games), no doubt have a wildly different experience on SG, than a user like me with ~1k games.

I can only imagine how unsatisfying their experience is, going through train after train, and seeing no GAs they can enter.

Or public GAs with the games they can enter all getting way above average entries...

Granted, these users are small as a percentage of SGs active users, but they are hugely impactful to overall activity on the site.

People with ~1k game libraries are spoiled on here, imo.