Twitch Giveaway Rules: How to Run Legal, High-Impact Promotions

Running a giveaway on Twitch is an awesome way to grow your followers, your chat and your stream numbers, and to promote your sponsors.

You do need to follow Twitch's rules and the law where you run it, or the giveaway can get you into trouble.

That is why many streamers run their giveaways with Gleam. Gleam handles the entries, generates your terms and conditions and picks winners at random, so you can focus on your stream.

In this guide, we will cover:

1. Twitch Giveaway Rules
2. Follow Giveaway Laws
3. Create Terms and Conditions
4. Pick Winners Fairly
5. Why Use Gleam?

Twitch giveaway rules are similar to most social media platforms, and are mostly legal requirements to prevent things like illegal lotteries.

Before you get started, read through the Twitch community guidelines.

Your giveaway must not break the Twitch Terms of Service or Community Guidelines, or encourage anybody else to. Giving away a restricted or prohibited item counts, because the giveaway promotes it.

Your giveaway also cannot require or reward false engagement, like fake followers or inflated view counts.

That means no fake accounts, no bots, and no asking people to like, comment or watch over and over in a spam-like way.

Your giveaway must follow local, state, and federal laws, not just Twitch regulations.

For example:

• If you are in America, lottery and giveaway laws differ by state. We have a blog post on US giveaway laws by state.
• If you are running your giveaway in the EU, you need to comply with GDPR. Our guide shows you how to automatically collect GDPR consent on your opt-in forms, so you do not have to write it into your terms and conditions yourself.
• In Australia, you might need different permits depending on your prize value. We also have a guide that covers competition permits.

Regardless of the platform, you cannot require a purchase to enter a giveaway.

A purchase requirement turns it into a lottery, which needs a license.

That includes requiring entrants to buy a subscription to your Twitch channel.

You need to offer a free alternate method of entry, for example:

• Follow your Twitch channel
• Leave a comment on your stream
• Watch a video
• Subscribe to your mailing list

If you collect personal data (names, emails, addresses), you need to comply with privacy regulations like GDPR or CCPA.

State clearly how you will use the data and how long you will keep it.

You also need explicit consent to use any content entrants submit. If you want to post their photos on your social media or use them in your marketing, your terms and conditions need to say so.

Your terms need to cover every detail of the giveaway, for example:

• Eligibility criteria (for example, limited to US residents)
• Giveaway duration
• Prize description and approximate retail value
• Any extra costs entrants might pay, such as postage
• How winners will be chosen

State clearly that the giveaway is not affiliated with Twitch. Entrants then know to contact you, not Twitch, with any questions.

Add a line saying you reserve the right to disqualify any entrant. It saves you a lot of hassle if something goes wrong or someone cheats.

Set out when winners can expect their prizes, and how you will handle problems such as delays or unclaimed prizes.

State how long the winner has to claim the prize, how you will contact them (such as email or a Twitch message), and how you will pick a new winner if they do not respond in time.

If you pick the winner by hand, the pick is not truly random, and keeping track of every entry gets tricky fast.

This is why we recommend using an automated tool.

Keep the draw fair by choosing winners with a random, automatic tool.

If your tool has a live draw feature, draw the winner on stream so your viewers can see the process was fair. Here is a live draw in Gleam:

Gleam takes care of the legal and admin side of a Twitch giveaway for you.

Here are the tools that do the work.

Take a look at our template below, which you can customize completely:

We can generate terms and conditions for you from your campaign settings.

It is much faster than writing your own, and they are embedded inside your campaign widget, so there is no need to cram them into a long caption.

You can also edit them to add any specific rules you want.

We automatically provide an alternate method of entry if your giveaway uses a paid entry method.

The AMOE must:

• Be simple and open to everyone
• Give the same chance of winning as paid entries
• Not give paid entrants an unfair advantage or extra entries

Keep this in mind if you are asking people to pay to subscribe to your Twitch channel or buy a product.

We can randomly select winners for you, saving you time and stress.

We even have a public-facing live draw feature, so you can pick the winner live on stream.

Gleam also detects fraudulent entries, so invalid ones are filtered out and cannot win. You do not have to check that the winning entry completed everything.

We help you get explicit consent to collect entry data.

You are covered if you want to use entrant photos in a marketing campaign or send follow-up emails, as long as your terms say so.