I'd say releasing L4D2 so soon would be a mistake. Early adopters of L4D (including myself) found themselves surrounded by huge issues with online play, primarily in finding stable servers (or finding servers at all). The content updates released for it have been few and far in between. There's been little to no development actually put into the game since launch.

A L4D2 release would just be a slap in the face to the loyal L4D fans who stuck through all that garbage to where L4D is today.

I don't get it. Why would Valve offer L4D2 as an upgrade or offer discounts when it's a one time buy. I could see if it was an MMORPG where you pay a monthly subscription fee after purchasing the game, otherwise it doesn't make any sense. Isn't that like saying if you bought, say, Devil May Cry, you should get a discount on the sequel or get it for free because the original isn't as good as it could be potentially? Are they suggesting that L4D2 is just a bunch of upgrades meant initially for the L4D?

I don't have a problem with it. L4D will have been out a year and even with recent DLC is starting to wear a little thin. You can only kill so many zombies in the same locations, in the same way with the same weapons and you're now getting to a yawn factor.

L4D2 will have new landscapes, new weapons, different boss zombies - it's a different different game with the same theme. In my mind, that's another stand-alone purchase, not an expansion.

Lastly, as of April, L4D has sold over 4 million units - probably closer to 5 million units now with the specials Valve has been running. So those 21,000 "protestors" amount to .0042 percentage of total units sold. In other words, completely and totally insignificant.

When I first heard the news I was torn between 'I paid full price for a beta???' and 'Wow, an expansion pack! Finally real content for L4D.' When I heard that it was going to be a full game I was pretty pissed off.

Now that my initial anger has worn off, it's time to be a bit more rational about the news of the L4D sequel. After thinking about it (and looking at my stats in the game), I got my moneys worth out of L4D 10 times over and I will continue to play it more in future once I'm a bit less bored of it and more community made maps become available.

I think another member of the boycott group hit the nail on the head about why a lot of people are so mad about this. It's not really so much about content because we pay more for less all the time. Who do you know that bought the Orange Box even though you had half the games in it? I did. We buy the Half Life sequels and don't make a peep (while crying for more) because that's how the game was marketed to us.

For me, I just don't like the look of L4D2, the new characters or the horrible 'horn and fiddle' crescendo music. Even if the new game was released as a paid DLC or as an expansion pack, I don't think I'd get it right off the hop based on what I've seen so far. If I bought it at all I'd probably just wait until it went on sale so I don't feel like I was ****ed in the *** like I did with L4D when the updates and SDK release dates just kept getting pushed back, month after month. Not to mention that L4D2 doesn't really have the same 'Holy ****! I need that game!' factor L4D had for me.

It's too much like the original without the character continuity like in other sequels. Would you have bought Tomb Raider 2, 3, 5, 100, 1000 without Lara Croft jiggling around in it? I doubt it. Or HALO without Master Chief? Unlikely. You get to know the characters and even though fictional, they become like a friend that you can kick some zombie, alien, mummy, etc *** with. The new L4D characters are either boring/stupid hicks or cheesy caricatures of the worst possible types of people

Unlikely in-game dialog:

Player 1: “I wanna be the fat black guy!!!”
Player 2: “NOOOOO!!! I want to!!!! You can be the scrawny cracker that sounds like he was dropped on his head as a baby!”
Player 3: “Piss on you, I'm going to be the sleaze-ball in the Miami Vice suit that's too big for him”
Player 4: “I LOVE playing the whiny black chick!”

Uh... Yeah, right...

If you don't know what I'm talking about, check out the game play videos on Youtube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dNHwr6fpAC8&feature=channel

As for the new 'stuff', yeah, there's some neat ****. But I haven't seen anything that looks like it couldn't be implemented in the current game. I'm sure within weeks of L4D2 being released the mod community will be porting those items into L4D without too much difficulty. Maybe Valve will do that so we don't have to.

As for myself, I'll wait and see what Valve comes up with to appease it's customers. Regardless of how soon a sequel is released, I wouldn't pay full price for a game unless they put a new game engine in it and made it substantially different than the first one, which they haven't. So I'm perfectly happy that they plan to release more content for L4D because it's unlikely I'll play the new game unless they make it backwards compatible to the existing one and rethink the new characters.

I won't get too far into the point about the music, decide for yourself. Watch the videos, yell me if the 'horn and fiddle' crescendo music has you climbing the walls and trying to claw at your ears after a few minutes.

I agree with TomSEA. It makes a good headline until you put it into perspective.

I will download day one

Most people I know who bought the original L4D have grown tired of it as TomSEA mentioned.
They love it, played it hard, and got their money' worth.

It's amusing watching 21,000+ people all crying at the same time.

This article is not even newsworthy

Not doing my homework, I purchased L4D (thinking it was going to be the next best thing since TF2). While it's been a fun MP (multiplayer) game, it definitely lacks in considerable content. Valve could release new maps, new campaigns, new MP characters, new weapons, etc.... as they do for TF2, but they won't. I feel like I've been a bit ripped off, since it's primarily a MP/online game, which should inherit new dlc on a somewhat regular basis. They should have followed the winning formula for TF2.

However, that being said... if they do offer a discount for the 2nd game, since the first game asked for the price of a regular, full content single player game of $49.99, I'll probably purchase it. They're allowed to produce what they want, and if it's a good/better successor (and they're not ripping me off) I'll be all for it. Otherwise, release some dlc, because I haven't touched the game in a month b/c I'm sick of playing the same thing over and over again.

21,000+ people all crying at the same time about the same thing is pretty newsworthy if you ask me. It is tech/pc gaming news...

Assuming that 5 million units have been sold, if I were Valve I wouldn't even begin to pay attention until the protestors had reached the 10% threshold. That's 500,000 gamers, folks. Hard for me to visualize a half-million people getting this upset over it, personally.

21,000 complaints are still quite a bit. Asking for 10% is a bit much, when most people are reluctant to or too timid to say anything, and smaller sample populations for polls have been taken to get valid results before, such as election polls. Out of about 300 million Americans, Gallup continues to take sample populations of about 1,000-2,000 people from around the country and produce polls that are pretty accurate.

21,000 out of 5,000,000 is about .42% of the population
My calculator won't do 1000/300,000,000, but it's about .003% of the population or about

Just throwing that out there. Valve would be wise to listen to the 21,000. ;/

The problem is that early users of L4D paid full price for half of a game and are not happy at the prospect of doing it again in less than a year. That could come out to be around $100 for what should have been one $40-$50 game.

Why did it 6 months to get the last two maps to work on versus? The SDK still isn't out and there is no word on other content. Value did promise TF2 like updates which was a reason many people got L4D in the first place. It also doesn't look good when Valve started working on L4D2 months before any meaningful content was added to L4D.

Though I played it for very little time, I enjoyed L4D, but didn't buy it because I saw it as a bad investment, even after the recent updates.

I can see I was right about it and I have to agree, this seems like a slap on the face of all those fans that shelled out $50 (or more if you're in the EU!).
But let's not forget one thing: The guy that sells the crap isn't dum, the guy that buys it is!

As such, it is Valve's EXCLUSIVE RIGHT to publish sequels of its games and/or give out free DLC whenever they wish.
How would it be if people would start boycotting EA for FIFA, Sims and NFS?!
Or Relic for CoH?! or MS for Windows?! or Apple for the iPhone?! or Intel for their CPU's?!

See a pattern?? I sure do: it's called BUSINESS SENSE. I, personally, don't like it, but this is how things go.
Something is new now, then something better comes out that sometimes is even cheaper than the original one.

It feels like we are getting upset prematurely. Valve would be crazy to let L4D fall waist side when they can still benefit from its future sales.

So they believe they can handle making new content for L4D and releasing upcoming titles too. Doing this even if they have to farm out the work to other firms, keeping a close eye on the projects is still a win situation. Id Software does this, with their titles so why not Valve at some point. Games are becoming more like platforms. There are plenty of opportunities to open up in the modding community when the SDK becomes available.

I'm glad the community has shown Valve their concern. Let us not threaten or punish Valve for making new experiences. Let's have some faith and keep an eye on how they fulfill the promises made. It is obvious our community has a voice.

Although the kind of outrage that could contribute to voicing customer displease should have been a sign, I bet a movement like this a lot of firms did not completely expect. This ushered in when firms create social networks around their products. Facebook’s own community outrage over a change in policy and this present situation are a sign of things to come.

So Tom..if those 21000 download L4D2 off the torrents..that would be "insignificant" also? Its just 21000 people...nothing to get alarmed about, correct?

Btw...21000 x $50 = $1,050,000 that Valve can just piss away. They don't need it because 21000 people are "insignificant"...right?

It's .42% not .0042%. Just sayin'. lol It makes a difference.

I'm sorry but i would've gladly waited another year to have all the content being released in the sequel to be released as one concurrent game.
Four campaigns, a handful of weapons and 5 types of zombies wasn't worth the first release, or the money I paid for it.