This is not the cry of an aging women who has just been replaced by a young blonde, but more the observation that the game which hasn’t moved from its position in the top five FPS games in four years could have been a big money earner for ID Software and SplashDamage.
Quakewars (the young and very attractive blonde) is coming, the pledge for long lasting support and updates are refreshing to hear. ET didnt get such love and attention as this old gal wasnt making any money, however the point of this column is, it could have done!
When you load ET you see the counter of times people have connected to ET. I've no clue on its legitimacy however moments ago it was at 1,056,215,739 - ET has been loaded over a billion times! Now that period when you see the counter and the map loads is around 20/30 seconds and with some creative coding I'm sure you could fix that period. Why would you do it? Advertising!
The year is 2003 and ET is about to be released as a free online multiplayer game. I am John Carmack and I am flying to Intel to say, "Please give me fifty million dollars over five years and you can put some innovative advert on the loading of ET for 30 seconds each load". Those 30 seconds could be updated by the master server or whichever place brings the counter.
Lets say this happened, the world would be a different place! The Q3 Source may never have been released and the game might have regular support. Punkbuster would be paid to update and kill off the cheats and it would be in peoples interest to keep people playing ET as money depended on it. One billion adverts served is a pretty big reason to keep your gaming being played!
However it raises the broader question, something like this might fly in ET because its free but would it fly in Quakewars...Quake 3? RTCW? If you told me all I had to do was put up with some more adverts to keep RTCW and Quake 3 updated then over so long I'd have yes please! Quakewars? Well, there will come a point when Activision think, "we've sold all the copies we're going to sell". When that point comes support for the game stops, no more patches, maps, anti cheat support and then advertising for a game you paid for dosent seem to bad.
The concept has already begun in CounterStrike, advertising is there in game the problem valve are having is that they actually aren’t selling the adverts. However CS is comparable to ET in the fact it was a free multiplayer game and valve don’t make much money off it either. There are no more updates coming from them for the game, they want people to buy CS:Source.
Is ingame/loading screen advertising a concept you'd happily accept if it meant for longer lasting support for the games you love?
Quakewars (the young and very attractive blonde) is coming, the pledge for long lasting support and updates are refreshing to hear. ET didnt get such love and attention as this old gal wasnt making any money, however the point of this column is, it could have done!
When you load ET you see the counter of times people have connected to ET. I've no clue on its legitimacy however moments ago it was at 1,056,215,739 - ET has been loaded over a billion times! Now that period when you see the counter and the map loads is around 20/30 seconds and with some creative coding I'm sure you could fix that period. Why would you do it? Advertising!
The year is 2003 and ET is about to be released as a free online multiplayer game. I am John Carmack and I am flying to Intel to say, "Please give me fifty million dollars over five years and you can put some innovative advert on the loading of ET for 30 seconds each load". Those 30 seconds could be updated by the master server or whichever place brings the counter.
Lets say this happened, the world would be a different place! The Q3 Source may never have been released and the game might have regular support. Punkbuster would be paid to update and kill off the cheats and it would be in peoples interest to keep people playing ET as money depended on it. One billion adverts served is a pretty big reason to keep your gaming being played!
However it raises the broader question, something like this might fly in ET because its free but would it fly in Quakewars...Quake 3? RTCW? If you told me all I had to do was put up with some more adverts to keep RTCW and Quake 3 updated then over so long I'd have yes please! Quakewars? Well, there will come a point when Activision think, "we've sold all the copies we're going to sell". When that point comes support for the game stops, no more patches, maps, anti cheat support and then advertising for a game you paid for dosent seem to bad.
The concept has already begun in CounterStrike, advertising is there in game the problem valve are having is that they actually aren’t selling the adverts. However CS is comparable to ET in the fact it was a free multiplayer game and valve don’t make much money off it either. There are no more updates coming from them for the game, they want people to buy CS:Source.
Is ingame/loading screen advertising a concept you'd happily accept if it meant for longer lasting support for the games you love?
ETTV servers can use advertising images during the load. Also you can try to make a script for a scoreboard on ETTV servers, which then can be sponsored by a company (a little logo next to the score). Just as Barclays has in England, and "Sponsor Bingo Loterij" in the Netherlands.
Personally I've moved to CS:Source and are no longer playing ET. No ingame ads so far there and I hope, if they come, they wont be as blatant as 1.6`s.
However, I guess it is too late now :=)
p.s - bit of a depressing article :p
" they have taken the first coca-cola crate"
Intel already has quite a profitable scheme going on with the game manufacturers: each successive generation of games requires a more powerful system, forcing anyone who wants decent frame rates to upgrade. This direct push to consumers is far more powerful than a 30 second advertisement.
It is against the interests offer most companies to stagnate their products, and this is what you would be doing were you a hardware manufacturer supporting an old game; in the case of CS, there is obvious pressure to move to source, the only different being that the consumer base in CS is strong enough, and united enough, to resist change. Hardware companies would much prefer that a new game be released every 5 minutes, one that requires you to upgrade your cpu and other hardware, than to have advertisements in a game that can run well on a 3 year old machine.
It may make sense for non hardware companies to advertise, food, clothing, etc, but then one has to ask why they would bother paying for their product to be viewed by only a niche minority. If the price were right, and if the gaming demographic suited their needs, then it's at least possible, but I doubt the money involved would be anything substantial, especially when you consider how easily most habitual internet users, of which gamers are certainly a group, develop selective vision when it comes to advertisements.
It is an interesting idea, but nevertheless one whose logistics would be fraught with difficulty: hardware companies won't touch these ads, so who will? How do you combat workarounds? Do you really want to piss off your consumers by adding a delay? Will there be enough money from ads to warrant support? How would that compare to just making a new game and selling it? And why even bother when most mods do the same thing? Do companies really want another CS, a very large, widely installed, graphically dated game, when, in the end, it gives power to the consumer?
We have to beg to have adverts to thrown at us for them to justify the effort to fix the original product.
Imagine if BMW, launches a car and says we'll give you some decent brakes in a couple of months if at all.
Companies get away with it because we let them, there is no other reason. We live in a society where ultimate power rests with us, the consumer, in our very hands: we call it "money". If you buy something, the company profits; if you continue to buy it, the company profits more; if you continue to buy it even though it's second rate, and it takes less effort and money on the companies part to produce such a product, then they will continue to produce it. If you don't like it, vote with your money.
It also probably has something to do with most software being inherently complex, much more so than a car, and, a fact we most often forget, the industry is very young. Also, most bugs tend to be quite obscure, especially where the casual user is concerned: since most software is released with that user in mind, it makes little sense to spend time and money correcting bugs which the majority of your consumer base will never find.
A much more relevant analogy, in the case of ET at least, would be if BMW were to say "We might give you a turbo charger or GPS, later on, if enough people complain that they aren't there" - The basic car would be functional, and for the overwhelming majority this would be fine, it's just that the extras which most power users expect are missing.
ps when customers do realise that some integral to the prodcut is missing or damaged, the manufacturers do a recall, which is very similar, in hardware terms, to a software patch.
However when I buy a brand new game, and have to install patches and check forums just to stop the game from crashing my computer when it loads, there is something terribly wrong (STALKER).
It seems there isn't any quality assurance these days (for PC games at least), I mean when was the last time you played a console game and had it crash on you?
It seems developers prefer to save money, and release a faulty product with the premise of fixing it when it's "in the wild". Just lazy and bad workmanship.
You are developing a car, a car that will be released in only one form, but which must adhere to every standard in the known world, and be suitable for all manner of drivers: it must be both left and right hand drive, it must be both powerful and economical, it must perform equally well off road as it does on, it must look like a sports car but have the available space of a family sedan. This is the pc world, with multiple hardware manufacturers, and almost infinite combinations of components: you must develop for all, and with such a complex project bugs are almost inevitable.
Now, compare this with consoles, which are very specific, and the same for all customers: developing for these systems is relatively straight forward.
e: http://www.cmpcmm.com/cc/standards.html for example
Name even ten and I will believe you, cause that's just laughable.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZhWycH6ax8c
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IDF78YEFdWs
And just naming Super Mario64 there are hundreds of them.
As for advertising in ET, if someone was to do it I would say two words to them ... Good Luck!
with cars theres x and x and x and x and x cars :)
with games if you like x type there isn't really that much too choose from.
so its a pretty in-elastic (get away with a lot)
There are ads everywhere these days, why not in a game, if it means no cheaters, no bugs, better game etc?
Great read btw, too bad ET didnt turn out this way, lets hope that RTCW2 gets good and use ingame/loading screen advertising.
But with quakewars it might be diffrent due to the fact that it will have a bigger apeal to public players (that don't allways mod their game) and SD has stated that it isn't trying to defend the ad's in ET: QW from modding. (It would be bypassed by anyways)
Why so, and would that have been a good thing? (Not just thinking about ET here, but all Q3 engine games.)
"Punkbuster would be paid to update and kill off the cheats"
Punkbuster have never been able to catch private cheats afaik, so I don't see how more money for Evenbalance would make much difference. The reason that the balance between cheaters/non-cheaters is different (is it?) in ET compared to commercial PB games is most likely the ability to get a new CD Key in 10 seconds.
I agree that they missed a chance to get some revenue from ads/sponsoring (like e.g. AA with nVidia), but I'm not sure that would have made ET a better game today than it is (thanks mostly to the non profit work by the ETPro team).
A splash screen (lasting no more than 5 seconds) when starting the game is acceptable, but I don't like the idea of in-game ads like in QW. If the ads meet my definition of "non intrusive" then they won't generate any revenue. =)
(That's from just after the source was released.)
only a hightech digicam without video option though
you have something in mind tosspot? XD =p
maybe the etpro team is able to implement it and if they get the money they can work on their own anti-cheat system and we can all stop using crappy punkbuster software.
I think smth like this could give ET another 1-2 years to live.
gain money with it -> game stays alive
so they're dead :o
Ingame ads would take some time to get used to, but it wouldn't hurt too much aswell I think.
do whatever it takes !
ingame or loading screen, as long as it doest make loading process last longer.
would (have) be(en) a nice idea
But what if you would have to pay some extra $$ to get a made update for a free game could that not help??
Say someone puts a massive fuck off "nvidia" gaming gear banner on the sides of the truck on sd2.. or on the radars (in radar ofc)... or even randomly around the map.
It'll look like shit, make the game shit - because obviously it really gives a great world war 2 effect with "nVidia" plastered all over the place.
Nah'meen?