This is not a legimite way of compare the two. Since its actually client side advertisement. You should look at software that allows ads to be shown in the actual client. Like trial versions of Opera and I believe Eudora have it too.
But Doug Lombardi also make the false assumptions. And saying that we agree to advertising on the web. At least we have an option to see the advertisement, since we can use third party sollution to get rid of them. This will not be an option in CS1.6. I block all ads that I see on a webpage. This could be one of the worst decission made. The problem is that it will certainly be some third party software that will block the ads from the ad sites. If they get blocked, there will be no ads to be shown. If valve then decides to kick the people out because the client does not get the data, then there will be a real decline of people that play the game. I think a lot of players dont want ingame ads in games like FPS. I think Valve should have considered this option a little longer. BF2142 got such a negative response when the news about ads came out and the playerscale seems to have reached its top allready and it has not grown since day one. According to gamemonitor the peak of max concurrent players for 2142 are 56k. (BF2: 161k, CS: 447k, CSS: 367k). And I believe that some of the reasons why it hasnt been that popular is the use of the ingame ads. Which in turn might be the end of the serie of BF-games. I dont have any problems with ingame ads if the system is built for such things. Like in some MMO's. ie Neocron is good example where they already included billboards. Eve Online is another one. The thing is that if a company go this way. They should also be prepared to hand over the game for free and take all the revenue from the ads. This is the only way to get a little better response from this kind of sollution. But I dont think it is the best way. As serveradmins we are not included in the discussion, since the ads does not go through our systems. If they do it is an awful design flaw from the developers side. But I do agree that they really are stepping on our feets. We pay a lot of money for setting up good servers sollutions. If we should count all the ongoing costs that needs to be paid for setting up the servers we end up with a lot of money. Ongoing costs mostly includes Colo and the work hours we do. On a small community with a small server farm that will lead to a cost easily above 100.000 euro per year. Since we probably need to add at least one full time job for this. And then above that there are all of the ingame admins. Adding their time will lead to even higher costs. This is what we are giving Valve and other game companies for free. And that cost is not even considered when they start thinking about adding features into their games. The gaming companies really need to start go through all the costs on all levels. Sooner or later all the communties will stop supporting the games and they have to set up all the servers themself and administrating them will not be an easy task, not to say how much extra the cost will be for them. Giving something back to the server administrators wouldnt be a bad decision. Like a way advertise our own community within our own servers. Or starting fixing all the problems with the serverbinary. CS would never been such a success if there wasnt for some small reasons. 1. Server binary. Flexible, openminded and easy to set up and use. 2. All addons to the server for administrating and changing gameplay. 3. The amount of administrators. If the serverbinary wouldnt been as good as it is, the amount of cs-servers wouldnt been as large as it is now. And I cant understand why other game developers doesnt check whats make this serverbinary is so good and then duplicate all the options we are given from hlds. Well, now I have written too much for anyone to read. So i will now stop. /Bjorn On Mon, 11 Dec 2006, Regime wrote: > Again, the example of Apache; It is a great product, but if it would > serve ads on every website that you host through it, without giving you > any revenue, would you still use it, or would you go for a different > webserver product? > --- > Regime > http://www.livebythegun.com > > Bart King wrote: > > While I can see the argument about server administrators that don't run > > gaming servers for commercial reasons (i.e. hobby or clan servers) not > > seeing any return from Valve in regards to advertising, you still have a > > great game to play, provided by Valve (server/client bugs aside). > > > > > > _______________________________________________ > To unsubscribe, edit your list preferences, or view the list archives, please > visit: > http://list.valvesoftware.com/mailman/listinfo/hlds_linux > _______________________________________________ To unsubscribe, edit your list preferences, or view the list archives, please visit: http://list.valvesoftware.com/mailman/listinfo/hlds_linux
