14 DAY TRIAL // Nowadays, everything is an advertising platform and video games make one of the best platforms supporting adverts. With sports games it's understandable - you couldn't get the same gameplay experience without them. But what happens when Valve has plans in-game advertising for Counter-Strike? Why would they do something like this in the first place?
Right from the first paragraph of the story, Eurogamer reports that Valve co-founder Gabe Newell said that plans for in-game advertising for Counter-Strike is part of an effort to ease the distribution of smaller games. So that answers it I guess.
"I think that we're going to start to see games that would struggle to get traditional publisher funding find that advertising is a great way of finding and developing an audience," he continued. "That's why we're putting the effort to make it possible for people to use Steam to do advertising-supported games. So we really see this as another option that we and other developers can use to figure out how to fund projects going forward. "
However, other than bringing a good monthly/annual income, adverts are useless. Sure they add realism but not if you fill every possible corner with them. They distract you when you play the game. Imagine an advert with ninjas: from 100 feet away, you'd easily mistake one for a counter terrorist and start shooting like crazy, while your team mates see you shooting in the direction and join you to putting holes in a brick wall, saying "what the heck is he using cheats?"
But that's not the case, as Valve has only good intentions with in-game adverts for CS: "What I would hope to see is that small developers can give away their titles for free and garner ongoing development support by generating advertising revenue, and we've done all the work to make that possible through the work that we're doing in Counter-Strike. That's certainly the hope."
But still, they make a good buck. Don't they...?