Valve Pens In-Game Ad Deal for Counter-Strike 113
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."
Free? (Score:5, Interesting)
Rape me (Score:5, Interesting)
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!"
Server hosts (Score:2, Interesting)