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Left 4 Dead 2 - Steam Group Boycott campaign reaches 12,321 and counting

Sunday 7th of June, 2009 - 08:25:35 GMT

...and we don't know if Valve will shut the group down once it reaches 53,395 members.

You can't fault the organisational skills of the campaign group; there are links to five other languages. Using the Steam group feature to protest is excellent anti-marketing.

However, the same backlash did not occur when the developers of Supreme Commander released a standalone sequel within the same year. There were similar short gaps between the sequential releases of IL2 Sturmovik, Brothers In Arms and Call of Duty with none of the web rage directed at Valve. In fact, the latter franchise has mastered the almost-annual release pattern with the use of two different dev teams at ActiBlizzard and the sales have kept on coming.

We'll discuss it more in a future podcast. However, writing as one of a number of players on PW who have broken the 150-hour threshold, the maths on the cost per hour at the price I paid for this game has more than repaid itself, considering there is no monthly fee as demanded by a MMO. If Valve is at fault about anything, it's the spending of USD 10million on a game that I knew all about already, in an effort to push it to the masses. If a sequel was coming out sooner rather than later to recoup this spend, then print advertising should be cut back for the sequel. Ironically, this protest group is the best free advertising for the game to date, even better than the E3 show.

View the Steam group page here and make up your own mind.

- Ken

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