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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."
With the simple laws of supply they should make Counter-Strike free then it would only increase their ad counts.
Wow, this one just missed the "Gaming's Biggest Blunders of 2006" article. So Valve got pissed when someone with a CS server put in Subway ads, and I am sure it is because Valve had something like this in works for a while. I think that if someone is running a server that sells Valve's games, Valve should let the servers collect revenue on these ads. I can't tell from the article if this is the case, but I assume Valve is collecting all the revenue for themselves (how would they do that anyway? do all the servers have to register with value to be available in steam?).
Many people have said it, but here it comes again. Ads are fine if they are not intrusive and make sense. On top of that, make the freaking ads destructible. I don't want to drop a grenade and have the whole area singed but the Pepsi ad is shiny and new.
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!"
I'll just use my special getting high powers one more time...
So...what domains do I put in my hosts file to assure this crap doesn't load?
Other people already pointed this out, but I'd like to emphasize this: if I see ads in my game, they a) better blend into the environment
b) significantly reduce the cost of the game
If I would have seen Subway or Pepsi ads in Skies of Arcadia similarly to how they were implemented in CS, I can guarantee you that I would have tossed it out very quickly. Those ads would have completely destroyed what is a very-well crafted and coherent universe.
Furthermore, I would not expect to pay full price for the game. Take the BK games for example: 3.99 for silly games, but competent games that are essentially one big-ass ad. I can live with that. I probably won't buy them because they're not my cup of tea, but at least I know what I would be getting myself into: a giant ad for Burger King. There is no surprise there.
However, I have the strong suspicion that the ads in CS are going to work very differently: most likely, they'll just be images of current billboard ads or newspaper inserts. Furthermore, since all Valve games need to phone home, they'll be part of a mandatory patch to an existing game. The end result of this is that I'll be looking at badly misplaced ads in a game for which I paid full-price initially, and which I bought with the understanding that there would be no ads in it.
oolo; Piss off, Valve. That's not the way to go about it. Sometimes I think that Marketing execs need to put into a torture chamber for some of their ideas. Just so that they get some decency conditioned back into them. "What's that, Fred? You think we ought to use cartoon characters in our cigarette ads? On with the thumb screws!" I think that'll solve 90% of the problems with advertising. Then again, it assumes decency being part of a CEO's moral makeup.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.