Gaming Giveaways

You are able to find most of the information on their nice-looking website´. However, it’s not instantly clear where the company is based. There is a company number that relates to SMILE GROUP GIVEAWAYS LIMITED, which is then owned by BY GAMERS FOR GAMERS LTD, and both companies are registered at the same address in Manchester – 1b Blackfriars House, Parsonage, Manchester, Greater Manchester, England, M3 2JA. If we try to look who else is at the address, it appears to be some kind of a commercial property – or potentially their accountant’s address.

There is a nice little story about the founder and the team under the about us section, but this is all very marketing and promotional focused – and there are no real details about the company, nor are there any contact details available. The only way to contact appears to be a contact form. The lack of contact details prompted me to check their terms pages as well, as you need to have some contact details available so that visitors can request their data being deleted and so on…. And I found a link to a broken contact us page from their Privacy Policy:

This is obviously just a mistake as they’re linking to “/contact-us” page and their real contact page’s URL is “/contact” – but that page that does work only has a contact form and nothing else. And the contact form itself doesn’t even ask for consent so… I’m pretty sure that’s not exactly GDPR-compliant to just have a form that doesn’t asks for consent, and then to hide every other way of contacting the business.

I guess it’s safe to say or guess that they don’t like to be contacted?

Gaming Giveaways does have a promotional page for winners that shows the pictures they’ve received from the winners who have agreed to have their pictures up/taken, and I also recall seeing a carousel at one point with said pictures. It’s a shame that I forgot to screenshot this carousel; as I think half the images consisted of 2-3 people, meaning it was quite clear that there is a small number of people who are buying more of the tickets or winning more of the prizes.

Or perhaps it’s just people who are more willing / happy to have their pictures up on the website, like this Ian fellow below as his pictures were the most prominent in this carousel they used to have up on their website.

You are also able to see the winners or the draw results, and again in this example it’s quite clear that there are certain gambl… Excuse me. Gamers. That pile in a lot of money into these draws (or potentially store credit, too).

 In a similar fashion to the other competitions, Gaming Giveaways does do live draws and uses Google’s own random number generator. The way they’ve also done this is visually nicer than a lot of the other competitions do, so kudos for that!

Note: In the screenshot above you can see the tickets to the same draw that I screenshot above in “Previous Winners” section – as I was curious to see how many of the prizes Rob had won as from the looks of it he had a ridiculous amount of tickets in total… And it does look like he’s got dozens if not hundreds!

Update to this section: I actually have to reduce the points awarded for the process, as I found out that not all draws are done live. Namely, one of the biggest and most valuable draws they currently have WON’T BE DRAWN LIVE!?

Gaming Giveaways appears to be slightly different to the majority of the competitions, as they do not ask a question to justify the competition being a ‘skill-based game’. Therefore, they appear to be (trying to) operating as a free draw with a paid entry method – though if that is not done adhering to the guidelines they’d effectively be operating as an illegal lottery & gambling site.

If a competition is operating as a free draw, you should be able to enter the draws for free, and this entry cannot be hidden or made less prominent on the pages, or be less convenient. However, it’s very clear that they are including the postal entry link as a ‘tick-box exercise’ – as it’s a lot less noticeable on the pages than the big colourful buttons for purchasing the tickets:

Additionally, if you click on the postal entry link, you are directed to a separate terms and conditions page with a ridiculous amount of text… Which is again, not compliant with the Gambling Commissions’ guidelines.

In fairness this is somewhat similar to other competitions and how they try to avoid being regulated, but the below popped out as slightly different from other competitions:

They are in effect saying that they won’t let you know if they got your free postal entry, nor will the entries count for any draw that sells out. Ok so, basically for a competition like this with a very small amount of ticket numbers… Surely most if not all competitions will be like this? I.e. postal entries will never make it the cut according to these terms.

Finally, it’s still worth pointing out what I think about the postal entries in general; which is that it’s really not worth entering in the competitions in the first place with free entries; as more often than not your entry will just end up straight in the bin. The real reason why competitions do this is to just avoid regulation, not because they want to give anyone a chance to win anything for free.

But it’s interesting to see that Gaming Giveaways is publicly stating that your entries won’t be acknowledged nor counted if and when they sell out the tickets on a draw.

Seems like this doesn’t quality with Gambling Commission’s guidelines in any shape or form.

Gaming Giveaways has been around for about four years (at the time of writing this review), and they have plenty of visual proof and social proof that there have been real winners in the past. So despite the sticking points that I’ve discovered (so far), they do have a pretty good track record.