Valve Pens In-Game Ad Deal for Counter-Strike

Making the (now fondly remembered) Subway Counter-Strike ads a reality, Valve has inked a deal with the content pusher IGA. An article at GamesIndustry states that this may be the biggest in-game ad deal ever, as this still insanely popular title racks up something like '5 billion player-minutes each month' From the article: "'As the world's premier online action game, Counter-Strike's player minutes exceed its closest competitor by more than 100 per cent,' said Doug Lombardi, marketing director for Valve. 'Additionally, Counter-Strike rivals many of the current top ten watched shows on American televisions. For instance, a top ranked, one hour, weekly program garners 20 million viewers and results in approximately 4.8 billion viewer minutes per month. Conversely, Counter-Strike generates over 5 billion player minutes in the same period of time. And, nobody fast-forwards through any part of Counter-Strike,' added Lombardi."

Comments

Free?

[MindStalker]

With the simple laws of supply they should make Counter-Strike free then it would only increase their ad counts.

Rape me

[crabpeople]

I guess the fact that I already PAID multiple times (hl2, then again for CS) does not factor into this at all? Worse yet, If I try and hack the games to remove the ads, they can just take ALL the games I have on steam and invalidate them. I knew I should never put money into steam. They have way too much control over you.

I just really don't see this as valve being anything but greedy. They don't even run the servers that you play on - people buy servers from third party companies! If I ran my own halflife server, and there wasn't a way to disable the ads, id be hopping mad. What is this if not just a straight cash grab by valve. "Hey, we have some unexploited asses here, lets rape them!"