Well my father and i were wondering what advantages could we gain from hosting servers? What could u gain moneywise if you got the game developers to add an "ad"server to the client? If you charged the game developers a cirtain ammount of money what would be a good price? If you have anymore suggestions on a way to make money with servers please post. -thx

"Almost none" is the short answer.

The only way to get money from servers is currently to rent out clan servers. Check out companies like Barrysworld http://www.barrysworld.com/ to see what they are charging and then deduct the cost of the server hardware, bandwidth and other infrastructure to see if you will make any profit. To be successful you will need to have a pretty hot set-up as the customers (clans) will expect to get great performance from paid servers.

As for developers they wont spend their time and money putting ad servers into their clients so that you can make money. They are too busy making the games. Several companies have tried to sell advertising in games and it never gets anywhere. Advertisers would only be interested if their ad was in every copy of the game world wide and if that was the case you can bet the developer/publisher would be getting the money. They certainly wont want you selling ad space in their games. You might well sell ads for porn web sites or other unsavory companies and the developers would not want these appearing in their games.

Nor will they pay you to host their games when plenty of ISPs do it already for free. ISPs run servers to attract gamers to their service (in the hopes that they will use the ISP). If a game is successful then ISPs will want to host servers for free to attract the gamers. If a game is a flop they wont want to waste the time/effort of having a server that no gamer is going to want to use even if the developer were offering money.

Dan Marchant
Obscure Productions

I''ve been hosting Quake and Counterstrike servers in the past, and the amount of bandwidth used (which you obviously have to pay for) is stunning and likely to get you broke if you don''t find a way to finance it.
(My servers ate about 20Gigs a day if I remember correctly and they weren''t even that busy)
No amount of banners or other ads will be sufficient to make up for this.

You really have to be a big company or have a lot of cash in the first place to set up this sort of thing. For example a decent conter strike server will need atleast a 1.5 mbit upload + 2 mbit download and thats a mim spec. For that one server it will cost you atleast £50/month and thats if your lucky.