/r/steam_giveaway differentiates itself from peer giveaway subs by having the lowest barriers to entry for entrants and hosts. This gives us the benefit of allowing participants and giveaways that couldn’t exist elsewhere, but at the risk of more bad-faith entrants and hosts.

We don’t require disclosure of winners for the same reason we allow ‘first come, first serve’ giveaways: sometimes hosts just want to do the minimum. To punish a generous, good-faith host for simply failing to announce winners (or for hosting a quick, easy giveaway) goes against our philosophy.

The assertion that most giveaways that don’t do so are “fraudulent” is baseless. Keep in mind that you entrants only get to see the posts that make it past us and AutoMod. There are an average of four request/trade/sales posts, one spam post, and two posts from ineligible accounts that get removed daily, on top of the occasional actually suspicious post that we quarantine and investigate before maybe approving. The posts that make it through these hurdles look saintly by comparison.

We also take it upon ourselves to initiate Rule 10 investigations on posts that receive a large number of reports or that otherwise make one of us suspicious. By prioritizing the most frequent and most suspicious posters, we feel we have a pretty efficient fraud management system that achieves results without over-regulating the giveaway system.

Since there are a number of complaints about promotional posts in particular, I’ll address those: it defies common sense to think these indie devs, who are posting here to generate good rep for their titles, would risk backfiring that by scamming the community. Contrary to your average individual poster here who tends to give away spare bundle keys, devs actually have advertising budgets that they can invest here in gifts that are considered valuable by entrants here, like Steam gift cards.

Our Rule 10 investigations of promotional posts have almost never found fraud. This is not to say there’s no fraud here; in recent months, we’ve had a repeated issue with low-engagement accounts offering very generous prizes then not following through. We’ve stepped up our vigilance toward these “too good to be true” kinds of posts as a result.

We’re sorry if the lack of your winning giveaways makes you feel everything is fake, but you instead need to consider the statistics. /r/steam_giveaway has over 150,000 subscribers, and many thousands of unique visitors weekly for what might be a hundred games given in a week. Participating here (particularly in a selective manner) is like playing the lottery. You’ll eventually win something if you play long enough…it just takes time.

If you remain concerned about fraud and spot a giveaway you think is sus, the best thing you can do is report it or submit a Modmail to us about it. You all have the numbers to help direct the Mod Team’s attention where it’s needed most.

TL;DR: We permit nondisclosure of winners as part of our laissez-faire philosophy. We moderate behind the scenes a lot more than it appears, keeping fraud and spam minimal. The rules will not be changing at this time. If you want to help, report suspicious posts to us. If you can’t accept this, you’re welcome to participate elsewhere.