How to Grow Your Steam Community With Giveaways

Steam won't promote your giveaway for you. There's no feed to go viral in, and your giveaway lives off Steam. Every entrant arrives from somewhere else, like your Discord, your newsletter, a trailer or a streamer's chat.

What a giveaway can do is turn that attention into something that sticks to the player's account. A wishlist means Steam notifies them when your game launches or goes on sale. A Steam group join gives you somewhere to post announcements they'll see. A played demo is a player who's already halfway in.

So measure a Steam giveaway by how many of the right players took one of those actions while you had their attention.

Before release, wishlists are the action that counts. According to Steamworks, Steam notifies wishlisters when your game launches and when it's discounted by 20% or more, unless they've opted out. You don't send a thing.

Those wishlists still predict sales. Video Game Insights found a correlation of about 0.7 between launch wishlists and first-month unit sales across 5,744 games released after March 2024 (Video Game Insights, July 2025).

Each one is worth less than it used to be, though. In Chris Zukowski's survey of 160 games, 2023 to 2025 releases sold about half as many first-month copies per wishlist as 2020 to 2022 releases (How To Market A Game, October 2026). So the quality of each wishlist matters, and that's what the settings below are for.

That makes a wishlist giveaway the easiest pre-launch campaign to justify. Tie it to a trailer drop, a demo or a festival appearance, and make wishlisting the main way to enter.

The Wishlist on Steam Action gives entrants an entry for wishlisting your game, and Gleam checks that they actually did it.

1. In your Competition, go to How to Enter > Add a Way to Enter and search for Steam.
2. Pick Add to Wishlist.
3. Paste your game's Steam Store page into Game URL. Gleam pulls in the art, release date and description, so entrants see exactly what they're wishlisting.

Here's what entrants see, live. They sign in with Steam, click Add to Steam Wishlist, then Continue. Gleam checks their wishlist for your game, and if it isn't there yet they can add it and try again.

Two settings to know before you launch:

• Don't Allow Limited Accounts is on by default, so only Steam accounts that have spent at least $5.00 USD can enter. Leave it on. It keeps out accounts made just to farm free keys.
• Gleam can only check wishlists Steam lets it see. Entrants whose Game details are set to Private in their Steam privacy settings need to make them public first.

Wishlist on Steam is on the Hobby Plan and above, and sits alongside the other Steam Actions.

Here's the Beta Keys for Wishlisters example (worked through below) as a live demo. Wishlisting is Mandatory, and the Discord membership check unlocks once it's done. If you use it, you're responsible for following Discord's rules.

Hang each giveaway on something players already care about.

Across Gleam campaigns that featured a Steam game, the ones that started under 30 days before release had a 25% Conversion Rate (the share of visitors who entered), against 18% for the ones that started earlier (67 and 111 campaigns).

Launch hype probably does some of that work, and those campaigns featured a game rather than the Wishlist on Steam Action, so treat it as a guide to timing, not proof.

You're collecting signals that pay off on release day.

• Wishlist giveaways timed with a trailer or dev update
• Closed beta or demo access for entrants who wishlist and are members of your Discord (worked example below), or use one of the beta key giveaway templates
• Early access keys drawn from your email subscribers

Say your demo goes live at a festival next month and you have 80 beta keys. Staying under 100 keys keeps you below the threshold where Valve's Steam Keys rules ask for a matching deal. If it's a wider playtest, here's how to run competitions in a beta program.

Now you want players in the game while the store page is getting traffic.

• Launch-week key giveaways to put copies in streamers' and fans' hands
• DLC or expansion draws for people who already own the base game
• Free weekend promotions, with Play a Game giving extra entries to people who actually play

Your game launches on a Thursday and you want people playing it before Monday.

Leave reviews out of it entirely. Valve doesn't allow rewards for reviews, even as a bonus entry.

For a game that's already out, giveaways keep regulars coming back.

• In-game items or cosmetics for each content drop
• Fan merch draws for your most active players
• Community milestones, like a week-long draw for in-game items when your Steam group reaches a member target you've announced. Make Join a Group the entry Action and post the winners as a Steam announcement. The giveaway itself still runs off Steam

Group size changes how many entrants join. In Gleam campaigns, the typical share of entrants who completed a Join a Group Action was 30% for groups under 1k members, 47% for 1k to 10k and 55% for 10k to 100k. Bigger groups likely have more existing members among their entrants, so a small group should plan for the lower number.

The best entry actions are the ones you'd want players to do anyway. Two or three is plenty.

• Wishlist on Steam before launch
• Join a Group so your announcements reach them on Steam
• Play a Game to reward people who've put time into it
• Email signup so you can reach them off Steam, or a Discord membership check for players already in your server
• Visit your store page, which a typical 79% of entrants completed when it pointed at Steam (303 actions)

Here's Play a Game as entrants see it.

A long list of unrelated social follows dilutes all of this. Each extra step loses a few entrants and adds followers who came for the prize.

A $100 gift card brings in people who want $100. A beta key brings in people who want your game.

Prizes that pull the right crowd:

• Game keys
• DLC or in-game items
• Beta or early access
• Limited merch for existing fans

Generic gift cards, unrelated tech and big-ticket prizes with no link to the game fill your entry list with people who'll never open it.

Plan where the traffic comes from before you launch.

• Your website, blog or press kit
• Your email list
• Your Discord server (here's how to promote a Discord server)
• Social posts and short clips of the game
• Partner studios, publishers or streamers who share your audience, like gaming streamers running giveaways

That last one is the fastest way to reach new players. A partner giveaway puts your game in front of someone else's community, and theirs in front of yours. Here's a live demo with two fictional studios, each bringing its own newsletter.

Gleam shows how many entrants completed the Wishlist on Steam Action. Steamworks shows your wishlist adds by day. Compare the two over the campaign window.

They won't match. Some entrants already had your game wishlisted, and some players wishlist after seeing the giveaway without entering. The Steamworks number for the campaign days, against the weeks before, shows the combined lift from everything you did that week, trailer included. To see the giveaway's own share, link entrants to your store page with a giveaway-only UTM tag. The Steamworks UTM Analytics report counts the wishlists that come within 72 hours of a click, from players signed in to Steam.

Start with one wishlist giveaway around your next trailer, then check your wishlist count in Steamworks the week after.