IGA Worldwide has announced a deal with Valve Software to provide in-game advertisements for Valve’s insanely popular multiplayer shooter, Counter-Strike. This deal follows the revelation of in-game ads in an interview with Valve’s Doug Lombardi. The game still garners a huge following, with 5 billion player minutes logged per month, according to an IGA press release.
The player minutes figure is massive, which Lombardi puts into perspective by saying, "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."
While fans are stuck with this deal, other games have been getting the ad treatment lately as well, including the various Tom Clancy games from Ubisoft–namely the Splinter Cell series and GRAW. Lombardi advocates, "Gamers are going to expect and accept well-done advertising in games. We want to make sure that advertising does not detract from the game experience… Counter-Strike levels aren’t going to turn into Times Square or a Nextel Cup racecar. We have control over what ads show up in Counter-Strike and how they are presented."
The advertisements won’t create any additional costs–or compensation–for server admins. It’s expected that the service will launch some time next year and will not be optional.
With additional reporting by Chris Pereira.
