Valve and IGA have announced that they are pleased to have reached a swift and professional resolution of any issues that may have existed between them, IGA's advertisers and IGA's advertising agencies. Valve and IGA look forward to discussing mutually beneficial opportunities in the future.

Doug Lombardi: As for why CS 1.6, the main attraction for potential advertisers is the audience size. Counter-Strike is the largest online action game in the world. Putting ads into our games is a new thing for us. Whenever we’re testing something new, we try to be somewhat scientific — isolating the implementation so we can measure its success or failure. That’s why we chose just one title.

Doug Lombardi: We’re still pinning down the exact date, but folks can expect to start seeing them appear early next year. We will let folks know once we’ve pinpointed the time and date.

Doug Lombardi: The ads will not be optional.

Doug Lombardi: Advertising is a new and evolving part of the entire gaming industry. We’ve watched for the past few years as some of the biggest players in the software industry (Google, etc.,) have bootstrapped their efforts with advertising-supported business models on the Web. We felt that now is the right time to try advertising in one of our games.

Doug Lombardi: We make these kinds of decisions with our entire community in mind, not just the people who play Counter-Strike. Our very first Counter-Strike experiment was actually a business-related one: Bringing the game to a retail audience when it was already available on the Internet as a free download seemed to the community like a pretty questionable choice — but it’s worked out well with the community becoming larger and stronger.

As another example of ways that an advertising model may benefit the CS community, for a long time we’ve looked for new ways to let mod authors make money. Funding a game development project is currently a chicken and egg problem — you can’t get funding without having already built a great product, and you can’t build something great without money in the bank. If this experiment with advertising in CS 1.6 is successful, it may turn out that we’re able to help the next round of successful mods get off the ground because of ad revenue.

[ad]CS-Nation: What in-game advertising company is Valve partnering with in this venture?

Doug Lombardi: IGA will be the company selling the advertising space. Anyone interested in placing ads in Counter-Strike 1.6 should contact them.

Doug Lombardi: We believe that 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, so it is our hope that first time Counter-Strike purchasers will consider it simply as part of the game world.

Doug Lombardi: The ads will create no additional costs (bandwidth or otherwise) for server admins.

Doug Lombardi: We think that gamers would for the most part agree that Valve has supported Counter-Strike very well over the past number of years. Compared to any similar game, it has received an enormous amount of attention and ongoing development. Advertising is something we’re trying in order to learn whether or not it makes sense for us and for the community.

Doug Lombardi: 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. So, we’ll work with advertisers to figure out what kinds of things the Counter-Strike audience will be interested in and present them in a way that blends well with the game experience.

Any player who has spent a lot of time on Dust2 will already be familiar with what advertising will look like in the game world. Take a look at the Gamehelper.com logos on the walls that have been there since the map was first shipped.

CS-Nation: Additionally, are there plans to introduce ads into the single player world of Half-Life 2? Or will this be a trial run for the program, and future endeavors hinge on how well the advertising goes over in CS1.6?

Doug Lombardi: Right now, we’re just testing things with CS 1.6.

Doug Lombardi: Community feedback will be an important input in to how judge the success of advertising in our games, when we do it and when we don’t, and how we implement advertising in games. Initially, when ads move into a space where they haven’t existed before, like onto a Web site that hasn’t previously advertised, they are pretty noticeable for a while. But as long as the ads don’t interfere with the use of the site (like those annoying ones which sit on top of the content you’re trying to read) they quickly become part of the accepted experience.

Doug Lombardi: The current plan is to put ads in a few different places. There will be some ads posted on walls in the game world, an ad on the scoreboard screen, and one in the letterboxed area of Spectator mode.

Doug Lombardi: Valve places tremendous value in its customer relationships. We wouldn’t ship anything to customers that we would not run ourselves.

Doug Lombardi: We just introduced the new dynamic pricing system to CS: Source, and we’re watching how that test plays out before we decide to extend it. Meanwhile, we’re working on some changes to the weapons in CS: Source (pistols, specifically) based on what we’ve learned from the pricing experiment. We’re also working on some new voice chat features which will eventually apply to both versions of the game. We’ll talk more about those things later.