Ads end up in the strangest places

Via Consumerist and ars technica. Counterstrike is a MMORG. The company which produces it outsources the hosting of the game to 3^rd system providers, typically ISPs. Subway hired an ad agency to promote a new sandwich. Through a chain of companies I'm not going to repost here, the advertising ended up being placed on a billboard inside the Counterstrike game, using a modification to the code running the server side component of the game. What is interesting is that a third-party company, entirely unrelated from Valve (the producers of Counter-Strike), has found a way to make money from the millions of people who play the game without dealing with Valve directly. Valve has responded that this violates the game's EULA, though it would appear to be more a contractual issue (between Valve and its service providers).

I find this fascinating. Is it a security issue? Yes and no. Yes: the play of the game can apparently be affected by modifications to the game by third parties, not the producer of the game nor the user/consumer, but by the organization hosting the game. No: in this specific case, what was changed was display content and not the play of the game itself.

But, in a universe where people are making real-world money playing in these MMO(R)Gs, this would appear to be a point where one could insert code to take advantage of the process of game play. I mean, if you can change the display copy (leaving aside the matter of whether or not another organization had paid the game developer to advertise on that space in the first place), you can probably affect the game play. And the effect of changing the game play can have real world monetary impact.

On the other hand, companies like Valve choose to outsource the hosting of these games to distribute the capital cost. Instead of having to raise and maintain massive server farms, the company offloads that cost, and risk, for a small reward to third parties. Some comments on both articles argue that it's entirely fair for these third parties to recoup their costs by additional means than whatever licensing or revenue stream exist for hosting the game.

See my earlier posting on the interchange between online game economies and real-world monetary markets, and Edward Castronova's new book Synthetic Worlds : The Business and Culture of Online Games about the worlds within online games.