This news has been in the air for some time, but now that it seems to be imminent I’ll waste a post on this. Valve Software, the developer of titles such as Half-Life and Half-Life² has announced it is going to implement advertisement in the game Counter-Strike.
For more on this subject, I refer to the original CSnation interview.
Advertisement in games is actually not new. The first time I personally was confronted with them was with Sony Online Entertainment’s Planet Side. There you’d have an Intel logo on the loading screen, telling how AMD owners had made a bad choice.
Why this particular news bothers me personally has to do with a couple of things.
First most the history of Counter-Strike comes to mind. Counter-Strike started out as a mod developed by Minh ‘gooseman’ Le and Jess Cliffe based on the Half-Life engine. This game became so popular in such a short time, that within a few years it had the biggest player base in the world.
After Counter-Strike proved to be a huge success Valve, the producer of Half-Life, bought up the rights for Counter-Strike. Since then Valve has given support to Counter-Strike. This only was the most logical step, because Counter-Strike was solely responsible for the continued sell of Half-Life, even six years after the original release date.
This game, which Valve has so much to owe for is now subject of being dressed up in advertisement. Somewhere deep down inside of me, remembering how it all started, it seems wrong.
Valve claims that this measure was devised to tackle the chicken-and-egg problem of software creation for mods (you need money to make a game, you need a game to make money). On the other hand, I did not really find any reference to as how that revenue will actually be used. For all I know it can be used to boost revenue for Vivendi and increase stock value. And why should be though otherwise considering the vast successes of Valve will have you think that finances would be the last of their concerns.
The second part of my objection is that this advertisement is done on all of the approximately 30.000 counter-strike servers all over the world. All of these servers, usually privately financed by game fanatics themselves will have no control over whether the game advertises or not; advertisement as announced is going to be a fixed feature that cannot be turned off.
Even though Valve claims the advertisement will not have any influence on traffic it still influences the game servers themselves. Valve simply leaves the server owners no choice to either accept them making a buck over their investment or just to get rid of the software itself. If anything the server owner should have a say into the matter, simply because Valve is profiting from the fact that the owners have allocated their hardware for this game.
And then the game itself; the question is, will it suffer from this rather controversial change in the software. Knowing gamers and the sensation that in everyday life they are already saturated with the commercial messages around them, they will be likely to protest and complain. It is well possible that with this action Valve creates a breach in the community between those who will accept the ads and those who won’t and quit.
Of course a massive bail out from gamers is the last thing I’d expect; I’ve seen it happen on Planet Side and a lot of kids were complaining, but in the end they loved the game too much to quit. (Whereas I did quit) And I believe this is the horse Valve is betting on; people like the game so much they would probably not abandon it over advertisement.
Then the last question: is it really necessary? Valve claims that this will help the mod and game development, but I really think that this is not the way to go forward. Games are to many a means of relax, have fun and escape the serious world we nowadays live in. To just be confronted with that world in the form of advertisement will inadvertently influence that and thus influence the game experience, no matter how subtle you make the posters on the game maps.
Nice blog Gref. Lots of good points. This still really pisses me off though. Besides, the revenue they’ll get from this game isn’t going to go and help 1.6. Last time they’ve updated was well over a year ago. Oh well, I guess they’ll be able to help with other projects.
I agree; their statement of using such methods to help mods defeat the chicken-and-egg problem seemed weird when they are implementing such a feature on CS. The only reason is, because CS is still the most played online FPS and as such will yield the most revenue.
Speaking of yield, I believe it will not be succesful because of 2 reasons:
a) there is no way you can check turn over from advertising in games and;
b) starting mods have a starting crowd and thus a very limited reach for advertisers. As such not attractive to advertise on.
This is beside the fact it probably WILL scare people away from starting mods if you are already going to implements advertisement on it, because they haven’t been ‘hooked’ by the game itself yet, ergo the threshold is too high to implement ads in starting mods.
I think your point about the hardware hosting is an important one.
Game creators like Valve depend on the goodwill of technical players to host, sometimes at great expense to themselves, game servers.
For almost every other aspect of the game, the admin of the server retains full control of the game experience he wasnts his guest players to experiance.
The only exeption to this rule historically has been systems like punkbuster, which are intrusive, but one could hardly clail they where not nessesary on the larger scale. And even then, admins had the option of not turning that feature on, though you probably would not want to anyway.
But now Valve wants to push something down the throats of admins. At least, having not read the article myself yet, I can only assume they will not make this optional.. wouldnt make a lot of sense considdering what they are trying to achieve with it.
But how indeed can they even enforce this? What if an admin is running custom maps, etc. Imagine a mirror world of CS 1.6 servers running all the standard CS1.6 maps, ssans the advertisement ‘textures’…