The Giant Bomb Community Game Giveaway: One Year and Counting

The first Game Giveaway was hosted on January 16th, 2011, in the Off-Topic forum. On July 1st, almost six months later, I wrote an in-depth blog post about the origin of the contest and provided some stats. I said pretty much everything I wanted to say back then, so this post will be far shorter. 

First, let's start with the old stats that I wrote at the beginning of the aforementioned post:

• 28 games have been given away.
• 20 of those games were donations from 11 different people.
• 12 out of 28 games were physical copies and had to be shipped. Let's say it cost $7 average for me to ship each game, including cost of bubble envelopes, delivery confirmation etc. 12x7 = $84 spent. This does not include the cost of shipping that the two donors who sent physical games had to pay.
• 3200 Microsoft Points have been given away. These were digital codes, so I didn't need to pay shipping, meaning the cost was $40 total. This means, along with the cost of shipping the physical games, about $124 has been spent thus far.
• 30 people have won something.
• 1 contest began and ended while flying several thousands of feet in the air.
• Vito's Game Giveaway has never missed a week!

Now, the new stats as of The Giant Bomb Community Game Giveaway #100:

• 150 games have been given away. I count bundles as one game, so this number is actually far higher.
• Those 150 games are the result of my own donations along with 93 other donations.
• 22 out of those 150 games were physical copies that had to be shipped. Let's say it costs $7 for me to ship each game, including cost of bubble envelopes, delivery confirmation etc., and let's subtract one game since I wasn't the one who shipped it. 21x7 = $147. This does not include the cost of shipping the three donors who sent me physical copies of games had to pay.
• 3200 Microsoft Points have been given away. These were digital codes, so I didn't need to pay shipping, meaning the cost was $40 total. This means, along with the cost of shipping the physical games and the $25 I spent specifically on games (X-COM: UFO Defense and Bastion) to give away, about $212 has been spent thus far.
• 144 people have won something. Less than five of those people are repeat winners.
• 1 contest began and ended while flying several thousands of feet in the air.
• The Giant Bomb Community Game Giveaway has never missed a week!

The look of the contests haven't changed much since contest #23. The only major changes that have happened have been the name change from Vito's Game Giveaway to The Giant Bomb Community Game Giveaway (at contest #55) and the new banner (at contest #58 and done by Deusx), both of which are a result of my username change from my Internet pseudonym of 10 years (Vito Raliffe) to my real-life name of 23 years (CharlesAlanRatliff). As I mentioned in a previous post, the change was also because the community had donated far more than I by that point, so it didn't make sense for my name to be in the title.

As far as special events go, the most notable ones would be contest #50 where there were 15 winners to celebrate The Big Live Live Show, and contest #62 which marked the start of the contests happening daily (or near daily). The latter was originally as a celebration of Christmas and also because I had so many damn donations. The daily contests ran from December 1st to January 16th, which was both the one-year anniversary celebration and the 100th contest in total. The only reason they've returned to their weekly format since then is due to the amount of time it takes to do them every day. I wish to focus that time on other projects for now, though I'm sure daily contests will return sometime in the future.

Big thanks to everyone who's donated; we wouldn't even be close to contest #100 if it weren't for you! As always, their names can be found here and here.

The last two lines I wrote six months ago were 

And seriously, you guys? With the way things are going, I fully expect Vito's Game Giveaway to run a whole year straight.

If you ask me, I think that's pretty fucking cool.

And that's exactly what happened. Here's to another year!

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Here are the banners used December 1st through December 31st. The first banner was done by Deusx with c0l0nelp0c0rn1 adding the Santa hat for me. This was only used on December 1st for contest #62 before Deusx sent me his version in time for contest #63, which can be seen below.