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."

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!"

Server hosts

[RichPowers]

I paid $40 for Half-Life and now I'll be forced to see in-game ads when I play CS. Is Valve going to give me a refund? No, because game companies have no problem charging you full price for a game and still making you see ads. But here's my biggest problem: people pay $X a month to run CS servers. Will they get a cut of the ad profit? Will they be able to block these ads? Or will Valve screw them over too? If server admins have no part of the advertisement process, then Valve has sunk to the level of EA... If you want to nip this horrible in-game ad trend in the bud, then stop playing CS. I didn't buy Battlefield 2142 because I wanted to vote no to in-game ads with my dollars...plus BF2142 just blows.