No not really, but I want to be dramatic at this point. Imagine a gaming community that is slowly taking over by renovating games for a purpose greater their original intent and you have about summed up the HL:1, HL:2, and the Source Engine in general.
So why would the community not want a new game if they liked the previous one?
Well the answer came actually straight from the mouth of a Valve Developer Dave Newell
"So each time we've released one of those (updates) for Team Fortress 2 we've seen about a 20% increase in the number of people who are playing online. And that number is really important because it determines how many community created maps there are, how many servers are running, and so on. So we'll do the same thing with Left 4 Dead where we'll have the initial release and then we'll release more movies, more characters, more weapons, unlockables, achievements, because that's the way you continue to grow a community over time."
"So each time we've released one of those (updates) for Team Fortress 2 we've seen about a 20% increase in the number of people who are playing online. And that number is really important because it determines how many community created maps there are, how many servers are running, and so on. So we'll do the same thing with Left 4 Dead where we'll have the initial release and then we'll release more movies, more characters, more weapons, unlockables, achievements, because that's the way you continue to grow a community over time."
Well to my count they have released some achievements with the new "game type", but has not released any futher "movies", "characters", "weapons", or "unlockables" to this date, but to be fair the original game was a buggy piece of crap that took a good two to three months to sort out. Lets just say if they are hiding all this update stuff for a reason then it really is a coverup for perhaps something bigger like L4D2 somehow mimicing Team Fortress 2, but that sounds like crazy talk. Gabe Newell has officially commented saying "We aren't changing our plans for L4D1." in context of the "original development plans" which conviently can be anything he wants in a legall context.
L4D is developed by Valve and it has been their tradition to produce an Software Development Kit (SDK) to allow for gamers to add their personal touches to games, but little did they know that profit could, and was being made from these "Mods". So this is what I believe is their current stategy to marginalize that gap.
So why the announcement for the release of Left 4 Dead 2? To marginalize the gaming community's ability to produce extra gaming material for themselves, and for Valve to break free from old promises. The gaming comunity as it stands is not very united on our user rights because of the willingness to steal what we could easily purchase, but I believe the reason why Valve has offered such great servies in the past is primarily because their game security tied with Steam that has cut back on game piracy.
It is not that hard to believe it could simply be the profit margins from a stand alone game were anticipated to yeild a higher profit, but if this community is really intent on recieving the updates they were promised Valve's ploy may backfire. In any case my expectations are the game will be reviewed by large corperate publishers and boadcasters before the release and will recieve great reviews on its enchanced graphics and multidimensional game play, but on its released someone is going check to make sure every single detail Valve promised is in the game, and if not attempt to raise the alarm for other gamers.
Personally I think the number at the end of L4D pretty much just counts the years since Valve sold out its gamers. Logistically it will be extremely difficult to provide what they have promised by November before the first community is litterally left for dead.
