Running Custom Giveaways with Streamlabs OBS CloudBot

If you are a Twitch streamer and stream from your PC or use a capture and send your console stream through your PC, you should take a look at running raffles or giveaways with Streamlabs OBS for your Twitch channel viewers.  This is a great way to get fans excited and reward them for watching the stream and being fans, you can come up with whatever clever rewards you want to give the winner, but for the example in this post I am doing random steam game giveaways during my Twitch live streams so the instructions and details will be around that.

So if you are using Chatbot the instructions I believe are pretty much the same, but here is how to run and customize a giveaway in Streamlabs Cloudbot which is the cloud version of Chatbot where you don’t have to install the chatbot client locally on your PC.  With Streamlabs Cloudbot and the Raffle/Giveaway system you can reward Twitch viewers by opening up raffles they can enter for a set duration. They can buy tickets into the raffle by spending points, points get awarded for view time and the default is they earn 1 point per 5 minutes they spend on your channel watching.  These points are saved and remembered so they don’t go away when your stream ends, so your most loyal fans can earn hundreds of points over days of watching stream sessions if you stream often.

So the first thing you want to do is make sure you downloaded and installed Streamlabs OBS also called SLOBS and after installing it and connecting it to your Twitch channel you want to click on the Cloudbot tab.  Then you want to enable Cloudbot and remember you have to /mod streamlabs in your Twitch channel or the Cloudbot cannot work properly.

Then I would recommend you click on the loyalty tab first and decide how you want to award loyalty points.  The default is that the term is called “points” but you can call it anything “dragon eggs”, “treasure”, “coins” you can name loyalty any term you want.  Then decide how often users get loyalty, this includes 5 minute default interval and 1 loyalty point per 5 minutes of watching your stream.    So live users are people who are just watching your stream and counted as “live” which means they don’t have the stream muted.  You can also reward additional bonus points for active users which are users who are active in the chat during that duration.

Again points can earn fast, as you can manually award points to everyone as well in the channel, so be sure to create a goal and system on how many points you think people should be collecting and the types of reward and entries they will get for those points.

After you have decided how you want your loyalty points distributed, you can click on the giveaways tab in Cloudbot.

Here you want to set your giveaway settings first.

These are default giveaway messages that broadcast for all your giveaways, though there are separate messages you can configure for Prize Giveaway vs Ticket Giveaway.  You can customize the message on Giveaway Entry, When Giveaway Goes Live (Start), Repeat, Close (when the giveaway ends) and when a winner is chosen and/or the giveaway is cancelled.  I recommend letting them know in the message how to check their points and make it clear how many points buys a ticket in the giveaway.

After you customize the Global Giveaway Settings, you can click save and then click on Add Giveaway.

Here there is always a default +Merch and a +Custom tab already, but you can just click Add Giveaway to create a new custom giveaway.  I am not covering giveaway away merch in this tutorial.

After you click add giveaway and choose Custom in the Streamlabs OBS Giveaway section, you will see the first tab of the custom giveaway.

Here you set the giveaway name and the timer for the giveaway if you plan on having it open for a set duration.  I have mine set to 40 minutes for example.  You can set permission for the giveaway and restrict a giveaway to subscribers only and/or subs and mods, but I don’t recommend this unless you really want to exclude just casual followers and viewers.  You also enter what the prize is that you are giving to the randomly drawn winner.

Click on the advanced tab of Edit Giveaway and you will see more options for controlling the SLOBS Cloudbot giveaway.,

This includes setting the ticket cost, which I have as 2 points per ticket, which means a new viewer has to have watched 10 minutes to get 1 entry, but again loyal and previous viewers can have hundreds of points accumulated so decide what you want to be your threshold.  To high of a cost per ticket and new watchers won’t be able to enter without being required to watch and this could exceed the duration of the giveaway to earn tickets easily.  Maximum tickets per user is a way to control people with hundreds of points accumulated from dominating the entries in the giveaway and increasing their odds so much that they likely will win the prize.  This is a good way to however cause loyal viewers to drain their points, but can also discourage new people as it skews giveaways heavily toward those who have a lot of points and have been there weeks or months before watching your stream.  I tend to not like penalizing new people who just found my channel and like to keep the odds fair, so I have a limit of 10 tickets per user.

One thing you can do here is also give a bonus ticket count to subscribers, this I also do as an added incentive for someone to become a subscriber and also allow a subscriber to have a odds fighting chance against a non-subscriber who just accrued hundreds of points from watching.  So I give a bonus 5 tickets for subs so that if the max is 10 tickets, they will have 15 tickets in the giveaway.  You can also give non-subscriber bonus tickets just for entering, but not sure why you would do that unless you wanted to give them an incentive to join the giveaway and for select giveaways offer bonus ticket entries.

Once your giveaway is run, it will start counting down and keep a running tally of everyone who entered the giveaway until it ends.  When it ends, or if you didn’t set a timer and you choose to enter the giveaway you can “pick winner”

 

When you pick the winner a notification gets sent right into the chat channel notifying them that they won, and you can include for them to contact you or just contact them to deliver the prize.

So, how many of my fellow Twitch Streamers run raffles and giveaways on your Twitch channel?  What giveaways do you like to run?