Left 4 Dead 2 Causes Boycott

Some people will just never be happy. Following the announcement of Left 4 Dead 2 at this year's E3 conference, many fans of the original Left 4 Dead have banded together to boycott the sequel. Their reasoning: that a sequel will completely undermine the original title, discontinuing its support and cutting off the release of new content for it. And while this group's main argument is understandable, as the game has barely seen a year long life cycle, it's also kind of ridiculous because it's way too naive to think a major success like Left 4 Dead wouldn't get a sequel while the property was still hot. Who knows, zombies could be out of fashion in another year, replaced by unicorns for all we know. It's also crazy that roughly 25,000 steam members have amassed to form this boycott group at the time of this article's publishing, having even assembled a manifesto of demands for Valve to take notice of. Kind of reminds us of the many hijinx of PETA.

In a rebuttal interview with RockPaperShotgun, Doug Lombardi, Valve's VP of Marketing, confirmed that the original Left 4 Dead still had content coming down the pipeline. Stating, "I think (it) will sort of add to this picture and hopefully change some people's opinions of what's happening right now." Chet Faliszek, writer of Left for Dead 2, also added in an interview with Videogamer.com, "It was just like, Ok, this is big enough that this isn't DLC, we're not going to be able to leak it out. It's cohesive, single thing. It's Left 4 Dead 2."

So it looks like support for the original Left 4 Dead isn't completely DOA just yet. But even with frequent updates, it's obvious Valve's attention will shift to Left 4 Dead 2 upon its release. That's just the nature of the beast. It just means we won't be playing with some 25,000 sour-pusses. Oh well.