Left 4 Dead 2

Following a recent interview from OffWorld, Valve’s Chat Faliszek explains the reaction from the Left 4 Dead 2 boycott.

So here’s a big issue: the Left 4 Dead 2 boycott, in which people want to boycott your new game because they think Left 4 Dead needs more work. How did you guys react to that within the company?

Faliszek: We reacted. That kind of response serves to focus people’s attention. A lot of people’s attention. When there’s an announcement and there are ten different threads addressing ten different issues it’s not so clear, but when there’s a huge number of people responding to one issue, well, you know you have to take a look.

I think in this case we just didn’t message correctly. We didn’t make it clear that Left 4 Dead was still going to be updated. We just didn’t think to mention it, we were focusing on other stuff. We, internally, always knew we were going to do cool new stuff, so we didn’t say anything about the original game. Of course we also intended to get the Crash Course DLC for L4D out before E3, but some things held us up. I think if we had that out before the Left 4 Dead 2 announcement, then it would have been clearer for our intentions. Losing the opportunity to get that right hurt us, but I think we made the right choices otherwise.

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