In seventh grade (2003), my friend and I were addicted to Counter Strike. I believe it was version 1.5 — this was before Steam sort of centralized everything. We started hosting a dedicated de_rats game server off of his parents spare computer for our group of friends. Over time, and because "rats" was a relatively niche map, we developed a pretty sizeable following of regular players.
We eventually started charging for "admin" access on the server. Being an admin would allow you to slap, kick, ban users, send game-wide messages, etc. It was sort of a thrill for folks to have that extra power, and they were willing to pay $5-10/mo for the privilege. It also guaranteed you a reserved slot in the server, which could get very crowded at peak hours. The forced scarcity (due to our crappy machine) turned out to be a critical factor. Everything was facilitated by Paypal.
Fast forward a few months, and we had a tidy little business on our hands. We eventually built a dedicated host-machine ourselves, and expanded to support more game servers. This was before cloud-hosting servers were ready available. We called it CounterAdmin.com — it's still on Archive.org's wayback machine.
Hehe. My co-founder on that project is absolutely brilliant and currently works at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. He deserves the vast majority of the credit.
Dude I know exactly what you're talking about. I remember getting so salty when I found out these admins that were slapping me around just paid to be an admin on that specific server.
That's an awesome first venture though 👌
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In seventh grade (2003), my friend and I were addicted to Counter Strike. I believe it was version 1.5 — this was before Steam sort of centralized everything. We started hosting a dedicated
de_ratsgame server off of his parents spare computer for our group of friends. Over time, and because "rats" was a relatively niche map, we developed a pretty sizeable following of regular players.We eventually started charging for "admin" access on the server. Being an admin would allow you to slap, kick, ban users, send game-wide messages, etc. It was sort of a thrill for folks to have that extra power, and they were willing to pay $5-10/mo for the privilege. It also guaranteed you a reserved slot in the server, which could get very crowded at peak hours. The forced scarcity (due to our crappy machine) turned out to be a critical factor. Everything was facilitated by Paypal.
Fast forward a few months, and we had a tidy little business on our hands. We eventually built a dedicated host-machine ourselves, and expanded to support more game servers. This was before cloud-hosting servers were ready available. We called it CounterAdmin.com — it's still on Archive.org's wayback machine.
Um, are you sure you're the least technical?
Hahaha I was just about to ask this same thing. Doesn't sound like @peter is non-technical at all. 😜
Hehe. My co-founder on that project is absolutely brilliant and currently works at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. He deserves the vast majority of the credit.
Dude I know exactly what you're talking about. I remember getting so salty when I found out these admins that were slapping me around just paid to be an admin on that specific server.
That's an awesome first venture though 👌