I have given away games on reddit in the past. In my experience, this worked best:
Make sure it's cleared with the moderators.
State in the post how long the giveaway will run (often 1-3 days).
Top-level comments count as entries.
(Optional) Require commenters to follow some simple instruction, like including the word duck, or stating their favorite game.
Accounts with less than X karma are ineligible.
When the time is up, pick a random comment as the winner. Alternatively, have everyone comment a number within a range stated in your post, and the comment that comes closest to the number you had in mind wins.
This gave everyone a fair chance against bots, hoarders, and resellers.
Edit: I never ask people to reveal an off-site account (e.g. their Steam account) because that would create a link between accounts, making them vulnerable to tracking and doxxing. The world needs less of that, not more.
Thanks for explaining. I'm convinced that autocorrect and touch screen keyboards are behind a great deal of the bad grammar and weird sentences that we see online.
Sigh... You conveniently deleted important parts of my comment, such as "at least with low-graphics settings" and "adjust for a few years of hardware inflation", and completely ignored the fact that I am talking about cases of abnormally bad performance compared to entire categories of games. The straw man you're arguing against is not what I wrote.
Given that they’ve developed a faithful and fairly wide-ranging representation of D&D 5e, I’m willing to bet that ended up being a lot more involved than their own proprietary system.
That game was just one example, but since you seem interested in singling it out:
Turn-based game rules cannot explain the awful graphics performance that game has, even at idle, on some systems. (Not even D&D 5e, which I happen to know in detail.)
Graphics engine enhancements might explain it, but in that case, the developers should have included options to disable those enhancements.
I haven't reverse engineered the code, but some of the behaviors I've seen in that game smell strongly of decisions/mistakes that I would expect from a game that was rushed, such as lack of occlusion culling. Others smell like mistakes that are common among programmers who haven't yet learned how to use the graphics APIs efficiently, such as rapid-fire operations that should instead be batched. Still others could be explained by poor texture and/or model scaling techniques. As a software engineer, the bad performance in this particular game looks like it could come from a combination of several different factors. None of them are new in this field. All of them can usually be avoided or mitigated.
In any case, the point is that none of that analysis matters for the sake of this discussion, because a community with experience using products doesn't have to be experienced in building them in order to notice when something is wrong. It's not fair to categorically dismiss their criticism.
(Thankfully, the Baldur's Gate 3 developers haven't dismissed it. Instead, they are working on improving it. Better late than never.)
I think it is. Note that I wrote 30km/h, not 200km/h. (In case you're American, 30km/h is about 18mph.)
The Last of Us Part 1 is another example. We know it should run better on our hardware (at least with low-graphics settings) because we have already seen the original game run far better on less capable hardware. Yet this one fails to do so even at the lowest possible settings.
Even Baldur's Gate 3, despite being otherwise wonderful, has some glaring hit-and-miss performance issues (think 8 fps at 1080p) that show up on hardware that can handle similar games easily. You don't need to be a software engineer to compare it to Divinity: Original Sin 2, adjust for a few years of hardware inflation, and have a rough idea of how it should perform at moderate-to-low settings.
I see people upset because the car isn’t a masarati,
I don't doubt that those people exist, but I believe they are outliers. Most of the complaints I see about underperforming games in the past year or so are from people with very reasonable expectations. If most of the gripes you've seen are from teeth-blaming Masarati-entitled loudmouths, I suspect it has more to do with the forums you frequent than anything else.
This doesn't belong here. It contains nothing about science. It's basically an investment marketing abstract with a bunch of oversaturated images shuffled in.
To be fair, one doesn't have to be an automotive engineer to deduce something is wrong with a new car that struggles to reach 30km/h while most of the others exceed 100km/h with ease.
(This is the first I've heard of anyone blaming teeth, though. That's a bit strange.)
They're getting money from people willing to pay for new Pixels knowing they can recover some of the cost later by selling them to you. (The used market bolsters the new market.) That's what I meant by indirectly.
I have given away games on reddit in the past. In my experience, this worked best:
This gave everyone a fair chance against bots, hoarders, and resellers.
Edit: I never ask people to reveal an off-site account (e.g. their Steam account) because that would create a link between accounts, making them vulnerable to tracking and doxxing. The world needs less of that, not more.