How can you know what will be? It is very simple, usually, u can`t.

What's the point of listing games with no copies available?

Probably as a placeholder for more incoming keys. Usually Prime keys trickle in until expiry, so BenKii might just be keeping them there for convenience.

Mostly convenience for me since I keep getting donations for them. If donations dry up then I'll remove them in a few days.

Can see someone not noticing the zero and requesting. Tiny issue, especially since they're daggered and therefore not a matter of choosing between them and something else, but for ease of browsing, may move them to the bottom of the list, as in below the link to other available titles, or if you want to keep them in the proper category then under what's still available and with a delimiter. Like:

Expiring Temp Freebies:
The Elder Scrolls I: Arena + II: Daggerfall (x2) [Expires Mar 13, 2025] !!!NO FORUM ACTIVITY REQUIRED!!!
===== PLACEHOLDERS =====
LEGO Star Wars III: The Clone Wars (x0) [Expires June 7th 2024]
Tomb Raider: Game of the Year Edition (x0) [Expires June 8th 2024]

Question: What happens if first of the month ends and there is no post stating the new month has begun? :D

Then it's still the previous month until I post the new month. Keeps it simple for me.

Of course, but seems like four people will be quite surprised with that, even after the fifth (well, technically the second of five) was told so and got the idea.

Yeah, I got to go through all the current requests and tell them not eligible yet. I was about the announce the new month but I've got to go through all of them first before announcing.

32nd of May obviously! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r5mGJPIvlLc

>> I had this response pre-written like a MONTH ago, and just kept forgetting to post it. I still wanted to post it after finally recalling it in free time, so here goes nothing <<

...

To be more precise - and please take no offence in my words here as they are NOT meant to be offensive - this way would be a way to think of someone with some 'non zero' level of honor, who is however NAIVE and still NOT disulussioned.
I said it before, I will say it again - >> this << edition of giveaway is more stringent than previous ones - BenKii DID thankfully raise the bar of some rules, making it HARDER for account resellers and general "key collectors" to do their deeds - the key word however is "harder", it's NOT "impossible".

As of right now 3 things are **still possible** :
1. Account resellers ( in the context of this giveaway: you can track who ACTIVATES a key, you CANNOT track who USES the account. Unless someone tells on themselves, account reselling of the accounts who got a game from this giveaway is pretty much STRICTLY UNTRACKABLE )

2. One user collecting games for himself through multi-accounting ( note here: keys activated for their designated accounts, NOT "asking on one account and activating on another" )

3. Ban evasion by multi-accounting

ALL THREE can be accomplished with a bunch of techniques, ONE of them being "account legitimizing" - Im sure those ( few ) of you who are ACTIVE on Steam forums know what I'm talking about. There are many bot / troll / other accounts there that use that to their advantage ( there are also such accounts on GOG, albeit HERE it's harder to track them... ).
To make an example to drive a point across:
Russian / Trump / other, political / propaganda spewing accounts.

The process of legitimizing includes ( but usually not limited to ) :
1. Setting an avatar ( accounts with no avatars look "less legit" to an average user, especially on Steam of all places )
1B. Bonus points if it's some random picture off the internet that would SEEM like "what some random average user would do", maybe an anime picture, some meme ( eg Nicholas Cage " :O " face ), or something.

2. Buying few games, popular games tend to be chosen here, eg GTA V.
2B. Playing them a little too, maybe also getting some achievements. This one seems to be especially popular among "half-gov social credits mercenaries" from China, on Steam, who also spew propaganda, albeit also slander and targeted harrassment campaigns.

3. Having some badges crafted. Users with just "account old" and "number of games" ( both default and free ) look less legit.

4. Having a profile background.

5. Having SOME post history / forum activity.
5B. I find this particularly dumbfounding but SOME of those RU propaganda accounts are going the way of "let's have ANY forum activity, even something awfully unrealistic", like eg they post a "hi" in a completely random forum thread. As in, they write some complete nonsense, and they do this in few unrelated forum threads, often Valve-made games ones ( eg CS GO ).
Tbh I don't know who they think they would fool with this - at least to ME, who is pretty versed with pointing out such accounts - this is probably the LOWEST hanging fruit to point and say "this account is FAKE".
But alas, it probably fools SOMEBODY, so I can't say it doesn't work...

6. "Account ageing", waiting eg a year ( thus the "account age" Steam badge would get bumped ), before "starting operations".
Aka account is in "sleep" / lockdown, and waiting for an "activation".
It's like cheese / wine aging, just for malicious purposes.
Even on GOG, or on ANY forum for that matter - average user automatically gives more "trust" to accounts which are further from their creation time ( cue older ).

7. Obtaining existing accounts of legitimate users and using those "LEGIT" accounts for evil deeds. Be it from some poor souls who sell their Steam / GOG / whatever accounts for cheap for some reason.
Or from STOLEN ACCOUNTS ( if eg your friend on Steam / GOG / etc suddenly starts spewing scam urls in group chat or spews some out-of-character bs on forums, chances are very high their account got overtaken, this is usually because they didn't use 2fa, but not always ).

It's an art of "digitally blending in".
For MOST people with "untrained eye" these profiles look "just like any other random Steam ( / GOG / whatever ) profile". It takes some knowledge and experience to weed out those accounts.
An "average user" while looking at such account would just default to thinking "oh, it's just some person who is new to Steam ( / other platform ), maybe mostly a console gamer, therefore they still have just few games on Steam", or "they just don't have time to play, thus have less games and play less", or "maybe it's some kid who can only afford a new game so often from allowance". A NORMAL average user wouldn't suspect such account of being a "covert" account.

But alas, aside from propaganda, it's ONE of ways to multi-account while "still looking legit".

GOG is NOT immune to this AT ALL. In fact on GOG it's way harder to track such behaviours for several different reasons - just ONE being that contrary to Steam here you cannot just click and see someone's post history, you'd have to Google it and HOPE "everything shows up".

In regards to specifically this giveaway, one person could have multiple GOG accounts, they would have "legit forum activity" on each of them, and so UNLESS THEY WOULD SLIP UP, there's pretty much no way of detecting this.
Noone in this giveaway would be the wiser.

In fact, this would be super easy.
I could EASILY demonstrate this in practise by going undercover over a span of a year, but I'm not going to, I have better things to do in life.
My point is, this is absolutely easy, most definitely someone is already doing this in this giveaway, and it would be foolish to ignore this possibility.

In order to fight these 3 behaviours the rules would have to be drastically overhauled - I however am not sure as to HOW.
This is a HIGHLY debatable subject, that would have to be handled with caution and care, no "winging it" or hasty decisions.
It is also fair to acknowledge that the more strict such rules get, the more prone to false positives they are - but then again, NOONE is "entitled" to anything in this giveaway so USUALLY false positives aren't that important ( imo ).

As for the "people claim keys for games they won't play, just for the sake of 'collecting' keys" - this absolutely was a thing and STILL IS.
I could point fingers, but I won't.
People do that, and people will continue to do that, because it's a MORALITY problem, and they see nothing wrong with it.
Tbh I don't know what, if anything, can be done in rules to prevent that.

I got flashbacks of being "asked" to relinquish my Diablo key after reading this ( the post I reply to in here )...

( edit: fixed some linguistic mistake )

Just one thing: If the community giveaway is for active users and a person has multiple user accounts for quite some time that are reasonably active, technically the accounts meet the criteria.

Other than that, circumventing the rules in a largely undetectable way seems sufficiently difficult now that overhauling them to try to prevent it from happening altogether seems far more trouble than it's worth, and as you admit, likely to lead to far more false positives. Which are a problem.

Personally speaking this seems like a whole lot of unnecessary FUD to me
People gifting games should be as careful as possible, but the main objective should be to make people happy with a game and not to overly worry if giftees are legitimate or not


I concur with this

If a person wants to police to the point of invading the privacy of who's using the account for the game he donated, I suggest him to first check the personal reasons for donating the game. I bet generosity or altruism isn't going to be. And I think that's what GamezRanker said in other words to a variant of bad feelings.

Regarding cheating, it's inherent to humans. It has always existed, exists and will exist. It's one of the dark sides of creativity. Be worried and sad the day when humans no longer invent, even dirty tricks.

Don't think I'm praising, encouraging or practicing any kind of cheating, all I'm saying it's a permanent constant and it shouldn't stop the equally amazing human abilities of generosity, altruism and sharing. A leap of faith must be taken at every moment, figuratively speaking. And this isn't the first place it happens. The entire society we live in is built on some kind of trust. Why do we follow the norms and rules if we cannot directly guarantee the honorability and impartiality of all our law enforcing fellow citizens? Trust. Have our own eyes witnessed the Federal reserve in gold backing the value of our money? Trust again. Those 2 are far from our daily routine, let's get closer, how are we 100% sure our partners aren't cheating on us? Trust. Let's thank trust exists! Otherwise all of us would be permanently frozen by paranoia and doubt as we lack the omniscient and omnipresence abilities as you clearly pointed out.

In case you don't agree with me, give Sociology a chance. You'd skip my irrelevant point of view to talk directly to a branch of science studying the topic for centuries from multiple angles. A passionate adventure, same with altruism and many other human characteristics like creativity. And we didn't touch incidental topics like forgiveness, honor, justice! It's a shame our world today gives less importance and growth to those areas of science. Who knows, you might dive in and come up with more structured solutions to cyber problems we all know exist without effective solutions, yet.

I could've avoided my text wall by simply saying generosity and altruism are bigger than cheating. My leap of faith and my way to enjoy this extraordinary event.

In my mind there are 2 (maybe “and a half”) donation variants.

The first one is this community giveaway. A donor buys a code and gives it to the admin of this giveaway (BenKii, in this case). In this form the donor doesn’t donate the game directly to a person, he/she is donating it to the community (let’s call it “the community’s box”). At this point, the donor’s part is done. Then the admin decides which person (account) gets that game, and he takes it out of the community’s box, not from the donor, and gives it to the person! So, in this case, the donor doesn’t basically have a say to who the giftee is, nor if that giftee deserves something (or asking for the giftee to be checked out!) or not!

If a donor has any doubts (or reluctance, or hesitation), about the above, he/she can resort to the second donation variant. That is to buy a game and directly give it to the person he deems worthy (so, no giveaway “middleman”!).

The middle variant (“the half” I wrote about), I consider to be the draws that OPs make in their respective threads. The OP buys the code. He/She doesn't give it to the "box". But he/she doesn't give it to someone specifically either! Only the draw decides who takes it!