Counter-Strike gets in-game ads News

yay, can't wait........ i can wait really i was just lying but don't tell anyone

Does it matter?? Smokin' aces was a pile of shite

Yeah well it's ads, it's never going to enhance the game, but they may be liveable-with. Which is the best they can expect.

Of course if they aren't liveable-with then as the article states, gamers are a notoriously fickle bunch, and will probably simply move elsewhere. Which may save Valve quite a lot of bandwidth costs regarding maintaining giant server lists and all sorts, so perhaps it's quite good for them if this happens to a game that probably doesn't generate them any revenue.

I like that he says Gamers are fickle, yet his ads are going into a game thats been played constantly for the last 6-7 years.

Jeremy Piven for president!

And: I'm sure if any community will find a way of modifying the game to block the in-game ads, it will be Counter-Strike players!

They stand out because the resolution of the texture is so much higher than everything around it.

Have you seen the size of them in the Pics! FFS Valve have some fucking standards.

was it just me who saw "IGA" and thought of the Castlevania bloke, then?

"We know from research that gamers crave real world brands as part of the game experience."

I'd be interested to know how they came to this conclusion.

weak :(

Why does it say "counter strike source gallery". Thats 1.6 not source. Although I expect it to be pushed to source games as well.

What the hell EG?

Those are screenshots of Counter-Strike 1.6, not Counter-Strike Source. And you use the terms interchangeably in the story. Do these ads apply to both games? I'm guessing so.

No wonder they look so out of place with the low-res textures.

edit: ya what he said.

This is probably the best patch for a game I have ever seen.

Amazing in so many ways. It's not just a butt rape. It's like a sadomasochistic feast free for all in one of the worst prison blocks of Brazil.



:) Valve you are awesome, the only company I could see topping this would be Blizzard if they were to integrate ads in World of Warcraft.

AH, sure why not. As long as the advertisement does not detach from the reality of the in-game situation, there's no harm. (i.e. a poster for the movie outside on the wall in cs_office wouldn't be too bad. might look stupid in the middle of an office).

holy crap they look awful, maybe a fw faded looking posters would have been nice, but these don't blend in

I can just see it now...

Blasting around de_dust when suddenly you turn through the tunnels and see a McDonald's advert.

I know McDonald's get everywhere, but in the middle of a warzone?

In-game ads like these have no real place due to a lack of context. Genres that are renowned for having ads in their real-world counterparts will benefit from the ads, but I don't remember seeing anyone on BBC reporting from Iraq with a big picture behind them from some corporate behemoth...

:)

How do ingame advertisements enhance your gaming experience? Wonderful.

It's really a bit like brainwashing.

Since I see this happening in the future for most games I see another good reason for modding a console. Just to be able to replace all advertisement-textures with nothing.

Or hell, I would almost like to start hacking DNS-servers to replace these ad-servers and send my own 'textures' to the games.



Serve some anti-establishment messages instead. Subliminal politics.

Server side variable "adverts=0" please ;)

Way to ruin the sense of immersion, knobheads.

"Gamers are a notoriously fickle bunch," begins Justin Townsend, CEO at IGA. "But through careful contextual guardianship at the point where game IP meets brands and their values, we have created a fantastic campaign that gamers are sure to respond to." - Meaning "We'll stick them in anywhere as long as someone gives us enough money and we'll ignore the users' complaints"

"We know from research that gamers crave real world brands as part of the game experience." - Lying bastard. Idiots may crave them but I doubt very much that gamers (i.e. people who love, live and and breathe games) do.

Unless there has been very resent developments, in game ads are 1.6 only. It's a ~7 year old game that's been very well supported for free over the years.
Be nice if the server admins/owners got a little of that money though.

I won't play CS:S again if it carries in game adverts.

Never touched Wipeout 2 for same reason, though I've bought all the others.

Also, isn't this a pretty cheeky, as we've already bought the game without wretched adverts?

Advertising worked ok in Crazy Taxi I feel -- take me to KFC / Levi Store etc. On the other hand, Airwaves in Splinter Cell (I think) was awful, and probably detrimental to the brand.

One thing I would add is that done correctly, in the *right* games and with a large variety of appropriate ads, I think it can add to the "real world" atmosphere. But done like this... ugh.

I guess they're fine as long as they don't detract too much from the immersion, e.g. seeing a Pepsi vending machine in a shooter set in, say, an office block, would be fine, playing a level 'brought to you by Pesico!' would not be.

@disc

How do ingame advertisements enhance your gaming experience? Wonderful.

I suppose there are a couple of cases where this might be true. Here's one:

I live in Edinburgh, and also played a lot of Project Gotham 2 which featured Edinburgh. Driving past bus stops with adverts on them in the same place they are in real life was good, but after several months the game image stayed the same, while the real life advert had changed several times. I can't say I would mind adverts like these Counter Strike ones used in those bus stops.

Not that it would make all that much difference anyway, as there's plenty of scaffolding and things in game that aren't there in real life now either. So this would be a pretty small enhancement to the experience, but nothing you couldn't live without.

My favourite bit about this mini-fiasco is that, to top it all off, Smokin' Aces is a big pile of utter bobbins.

Quite what it's writer/director Joe Carnahan was smokin' between Narc (which was good) and the aforementioned bobbins (which is bobbins) is a mystery.

LittleVoice: How did the fact that they were using 'real' brands enhance your gaming experience except to expose you to the real brand and thus feed you their logo?

In fact, I would say that fake ads in games that look similar to the real logo is bad as well.

Which gamers crave ingame adverts?

I'd like a list of their names and addresses, please... then we can pop round and ask them what sort of drugs they were on when they filled in the forms that must have been used for this 'research'.

All that codswallop-talk on the Sony release a while ago to do with Home - how advertising would be pitched at an 'acceptable level'

Might be time for me to find a new hobby that isn't about to be riddled with vacuous corporate bullshit - maybe morris dancing, or basket-weaving.

Toothball: Do real life advertisements on billboards enhance your life?

There's nothing lovelier than an empty countryside with no ads.

Not such a huge issue for me in multiplayer, but if stuff like this appears in immersive single-player games like Half-Life 2, I'ma be pissed. It ruins the immersion and the experience. I'm in City fucking 17, I don't wanna see an ad for a shitty movie.

useyourloaf: Unless there has been very resent developments, in game ads are 1.6 only. It's a ~7 year old game that's been very well supported for free over the years.

Yes, from what I've read this is for 1.6 only.

Maybe update your story? This could get millions of people very annoyed unnecessarily...

@disc

That is true. I never really pay much attention to bus stops anyway. An country road is a nice place to drive without ads, but cities are full of them, and I happen to like street racing games. And they are selling them on the details.

It just feels like the city is frozen in time when these things don't change. Perhaps fake ads that update every so often would be the best thing. That way, we get details and no advertising.

As far as I'm aware from people I know and posts here, most opinions are on the indifferent/opposed section...
I'm indifferent...If they use it like they're used in real life (that bus-stop for instance) then fine...Otherwise it might ruin the experience...

Plus that money will never get shuffled to consumers anyway...Pay for full price games and added adverts?...No thanks...

I can't wait to see the complaints when large crowds of armed terrorists turn up at cinemas across the country to watch Smokin' Aces

An country road is a nice place to drive without ads, but cities are full of them, and I happen to like street racing games. And they are selling them on the details.

So, because your real life is full of intrusive ads games should be too because it's more realistic? I'd prefer the other option.

@Disc:

Being asked to go to somewhere I recognised added to the feeling of being a cabby driving around a city picking up fares. In fact, Pepsi / Coke vending machines standing in the lobby of a city office wouldn't be a problem -- the advertising not seeming overly contrived and just where you would expect it. I wouldn't however appreciate having to do something like drink Pepsi to regain my health. The point of advertising is obviously to reinforce the brand, but I'm sure we're all savvy enough to recognise that for what it is. I haven't recently bought any products by Levi (certainly not since I first played Crazy Taxi), but on the other hand I have eaten a fair bit of KFC. Perhaps one precludes the other!

Christ! I expected it to be done tastefully, and subtly. First thing I see is a HUGE advert on the wall of dust2, what the hell!? Where am I going to spray my porn tag now? :(

Ads in games if done in context do enhance game play as it makes it feel more realistic. So billboards yes, bus stops yes, vending machine fronts yes but in counterstrike no. No matter how you spin it, adverts in counterstrike just doesn't fit in with the game.

I don't really mind if the ads are made in the same style as the game and are non-obtrusive. But if it's anything like the ads seen on websites.. geez. I mean, before I was using Firefox, it always annoyed me how long it took to load certain webpages. The time it took was usually because the page first loaded a huge bunch of ads from various slow-ass ad firms. THEN it continued to load the page that you wanted in the first place. With Firefox I've installed Adblock Plus and those old pages are now lightning fast! Eurogamer included!

If the game becomes slower because it has to load ads I'd demand my money back :|

Valve have been trying to get people to move away from 1.6 and onto Source for years. This is one way of doing it I suppose...

I don't think ads can ruin a game that is not narrative driven at all and resembles a sport. In fact, well thought advertising doesn't even ruin a single player experience, no matter how heavily it relies in immersing story.

But on a more general level, humankind needs less marketing :)

@Lacero

So, because your real life is full of intrusive ads games should be too because it's more realistic? I'd prefer the other option.

True, the fewer ads the better really. If they started including billboards in Mario Kart or something, I'd be at the head of the pitchfork-wielding crowd, wielding a pitchfork. But when they're selling a game based on how "realistic" it is, I can't say that I'd mind a little real world advertising.

But cases where this applies are few. It might work in sports games, with all those advertising things they have, or the office vending machine example. I haven't looked at the Counter Strike ones, but I'd wager that they don't really fit in like that. A movie poster in a warzone? That's about as realistic as a special ops team bunny-hopping their way to victory against the evil terrorists.

"But through careful contextual guardianship at the point where game IP meets brands and their values..."

Oddly enough that's where I, too, stopped listening to this drivel-pushing marketing-pish fartleberry who sounds so inept he probably wouldn't even pass an audition for The Apprentice. I just know that this guy is exactly like Nathan Barley. The original one from TV Go Home, not from the sit"com". Spouting inane jargonistic newspeak in the hope it makes him sound important or bamboozles the audience into thinking he must know what he's talking about and therefore we agree with him.

So, Townsend, basically you asked a number of your clients' marketing executives whether their children (because let's face it you're all far too busy to waste your time actually playing a game) wouldn't mind a bit of an advert in the game if it made it more "real". Never mind that the point of many games is to join a fantasy world where Gillingham can win the Champions League or you get to enjoy the thrill of combat survival without actually harming anyone.
They said it would be fine and so that gets translated into "gamers crave real-world brands as part of the game experience". Crave my bollocks.

Oy, Townsend. I'm talking to you ! Just look at all the posts above this one. Can you see anyone salivating like a starving man at the banquet table begging to be marketed to ? No. You can't, can you. You see a modicum of apathy amongst those who probably feel you can't fight against these things and that something like a branded vending machine in an office is absolutely fine (let's not get onto the argument between corporate social responsibility paternalism versus freedom of consumer choice at this stage). I seem to remember in an FPS years ago (was it Duke Nukem or Half Life ?) that a vending machine could be damaged, with cans spilling on the floor. It didn't matter that they were just cans. I didn't give two shakes of a rats foreskin as to whether they were Coke, Pepsi or Quattro (for the under-twenties a soft drink popular in the 80s - but not popular enough to see it into the 90s). Just the immersion in a world that followed "real" physics was the key.

bear in mind I'm ranting about advertising in FPSs or any "fantasy" type game. Fantasy as opposed to simulation (IE: driving game, sports sim, etc where the advertising is a key part of the immersion).

Oh, and as a final shot - who's been to a Middle East town recently where a number of walls were daubed with a poster for an American film ? Realism ????

Realism my bollocks. It's all about the money.

That looks terrible. Glad I got over my CS addiction!

"We know from research that gamers crave real world brands as part of the game experience."

Wow, that guy has huge testicles. Pity he's talking out of his ass.

It'll be OK if the games get cheaper because of it.

But they wont.

Oh, Mr Townsend, it's not so much that 'gamers are a fickle bunch' than it is 'they don't like to have advertising shoved in their face when they're trying to enjoy a game'. Particularly advertising that's so jarringly out of place.

"Gamers are a notoriously fickle bunch,"

Joins "I think we need a bigger boat" ain the pantheon of legendary understatement.