I don't get what the big problem is I guess. I judge a games value on 1) the quality of the game experience. 2) the game's re playability and 3) The number of hours of enjoyment I get out of the game.
As far as L4D goes, they got high marks on all accounts. I put in well over 40 hours in the first week of playing the game. That's more playtime than I've gotten out of any game recently. From the looks of L4D2, the updates are so above and beyond there's no realistic way it could possibly be a paid expansion to the original. Managing who has the expansion and who doesn't and making the expansion backwards compatible with non-expansion games would be a bigger headache than it was worth. As for a free upgrade? Please, there was FAR too much work put into this to expect that. If you ask me the boycotters have been spoiled by Valve for so long that they expect everything to be an upgrade for years. They need to grow up and get real. Valve will continue to treat it's customers well, I have no doubt, but a massive update such as this is clearly something that should generate some revenue.
Nice article and nice retort by Snarkasm. I am on the fence. I can see that Valve is a business and needs to fund it's projects and put money in their pockets but I also see that Valve has a rather tough road to competing with itself and TF2. If TF2 hadn't had so many updates for free I'm guessing L4D2 wouldn't be as big of an issue. However, since Valve DID provide so many things for free for TF2 they put themselves into a tight spot by not giving the same to L4D.
A bit of hyperbole aside I agree with Cliff but I think Snark has some really valid points as well. This would be entirely a non-issue—and I thought it was one—before I read the quotes Snark posted. It sounds like they do owe it to the customers to bring out some new content because they said they did. But I also feel, like Cliff that Valve has gone so far above and beyond for customers that it's hard to feel that cheated by this situation. I can see both sides.
You forgot about: l4d2 flamethrower l4d2 chainsaw l4d2 boomer l4d zoey and hl2 alyx making out
Also, good article. On the one hand I feel I wrung l4d out of most of its enjoyment factor (I got bored very quickly with it) and I feel I got all i wanted from it, but on the other hand there's that feeling of 'maybe this game was meant to be more and it just needs a little tender developer love'. Who knows.
Wow, the group has over 35K threatening to boycott part 2 unless Daddy gives them more free content.....
As a follow up, I would love to get a list of each profile in the group and see if they actually follow through on the boycott when the game comes out.
That is the true test, if you don't like it, don't buy it, but somehow, I am fairly certain 90+% of the people in that group will cave in to the joy of more fast paced Zombie slaying combat, and I am willing to bet they will pay for it.
If you believe Snark on point #5 ;*), hey, we are all defenseless against Valve's evil plan to get us hooked on quality games. They gave us the first taste for cheap, or gasp, in some cases for free!! (gifting from the bundle). According to Snark, Valve is in the business of pushing high quality digital dope. Hey maybe Jay and Silent Bob should man the counter at Steam? We obviously will have no choice but to cave to their alluring addicting product.
Valve makes good games. As long as Valves continues to do so, people (like I) will continue to buy Valve's competitively priced games as long as they live up to the quality of the Orange Box and Left 4 Dead, etc.
Think about it, has Valve ever released a game that was sub-par?
People buy six Guitar Hero games a year at $60 a pop, why are people throwing tantrums when a company well-known for quality games releases a sequel to one of their best games ever with so much more content in it?
I'm sure if Valve could release it as an update or an expansion they would, so why all the crying?
See when MS tells Vista Ultimate owners "Gee sorry about that Ultimate Extras thing but hey you can buy Windows 7!" it's evil MS trying to screw people. But when Valve says "We're making your game obsolete by releasing its expansion pack as a sequel but we'll make dubious promises to keep releasing stuff for the first one." that's just fine and anyone who says otherwise is a whiny loser with an entitlement complex. Right?
Let's try the numbered points.
1. No developer has embraced the mod community? Didn't iD release source code or did I imagine that? What about Stardock and their encouragement of mods? What about Battlefield, what about Unreal, what about... you know what, nevermind, I don't have time to counter the Valve-blinds of all the CS kiddies and HL worshipers on this one.
2. Yes the Steam "community" is free. So is a freaking website! We should be grateful Valve offers a free "community" aka "easy way to constantly spam you to buy our DRM infested games"? Wow gee thanks for that, you are truly the champions of gamers! Now can I play a game without ever needing a net connection, or do I need to go to Xbox for that?
3. Umm I'll deny that a retread BSP and static radiosity engine with some functive physics bolt-ons is "among the greatest games ever made" if you like. Wow, "free deathmatch"! You mean a feature everyone had been expecting from games for years and getting for free with most FPS demos? Wow how generous. Maybe it was released separate because HL1's DM had such crappy net code it got the game slammed in reviews and Valve was still feeling the hurt? And episodic games were supposed to come out for cheap and often, HL2's expansions were neither.
4. Ah yes The Orange Box. AKA "Crap our 'episodic' expansion took way too long to come out and now people are mad so let's throw in this student project and that mod we've been sitting on for 10 years because we realized we should buy CounterStrike instead and then killed it so as not to compete with ourselves!" Crap why do people rave about the out of the box indy game and the sequel to one of the most popular mods of all time and ignore our vastly more expensive to develop expansion pack for our aging flagship game?
5. Portal and TF2 were "only $19.99" if you had HL2. Well gee CounterStrike and TFC were "free" if you had HL1 ten years ago. This is an improvement? No, this is Steam ramming piecemeal sale of game features down our throat with DRM.
6. Yes let's talk about TF2! I love TF2. It's probably my favorite game since TF1, which I played for hours a day and even helped run a clan for. TF1 was the original quake mod, predating even Threewave CTF, and when Valve saw its success they thought they could buy it. So they did, ported it to the heathen TFC on HL with its crappy net code, and started work on TF2. Which was supposed to have this "amazing new engine" that I believe Intel used an alpha of to showcase the value of SSE (by doing tesselation or something). TF2 was going to be this ultra-realistic team based shooter... and then CounterStrike took off and Valve snapped that up. But oops, now they HAVE an ultra-realistic team based shooter! So they don't want to compete with themselves, an sit on TF2 FOR TEN FREAKING YEARS! Eventually it only sees the light of day by piggybacking on the R&D budget for new animation improvements in the engine, and even then only gets released as a "please take this offering and don't be mad at us for our failure at 'episodic content'" offering and is immediately seen as being worth far more than the episode it came with. And the people behind TF and TF2 have fought hard to continually update the game with new maps (taken from the best user-made ones that appear on servers just like TF did) and new weapons (much like how the original TF userbase would mod the mods), and somehow convince Valve NOT to sell them with micropayments or bundle them into a "sequel" or "update pack" that would kill the game.
7. Yes weekly price specials. Someone has re-discovered the basics of economics and that more people will buy an intangible non-need product if it's priced lower than if it's priced higher. Way to go. Now if only they could start showing that draconian DRM like forced online activation only hurts legitimate customers like Stardock has been saying for years and even EA seems to be realizing.
L4D2 will no doubt come out for $40. Windows 7 Ultimate will be like $260. It's much easier to pay 40 bucks to a little bit of new stuff than it is to pay almost 300 bucks for a little bit of new stuff.
It's not like making it an expansion will make it any cheaper, anyways. 40 bucks is what a normal expansion pack for a 60 dollar game would retail for new. L4D2 is essentially a stand-alone expansion pack in this sense.
The only problem I see with releasing it as a stand-alone game is needing to switch games to play the original L4D maps.
Snark, come on dude, you know that the stinky pit of an OS that was Vista is in now fair way a comparison of the Zombie blasting awesomeness that is Left 4 Dead.
Really? It's quite possible that both of them can be considered beta versions of their new final products - L4D2 and 7. Better AI, more content, some new looks... sort of like better performance, more functionality, some new looks...
Really? It's quite possible that both of them can be considered beta versions of their new final products - L4D2 and 7. Better AI, more content, some new looks... sort of like better performance, more functionality, some new looks...
Snark, do you have an answer for everything
Lets take the whole OS vs. Game argument offline for a second. It will get us nowhere fast, two different animals. Nothing changes that Vista sucked, the L4D does not.
Now, look at the history of game sequels. How many are new level packs for a popular idea? Mega man 1-6, Sonic the Hedgehog 1-3, All the 3D Zelda's change a few things up, but they are variations of the same theme, hell, ID had Quake I and II, then release III as a more realized, polished, and complete multilayer experience that some may have argued should have been an expansion to II. The Metal Gear Solid series feels like a continued variation on the same exact game play. Madden each year. Games based on Pro Wraslin, oh, this years will have more realistic cage physics!! Halo 1-3, 1 innovated console shooters, 2 added online, 3 was just more of the goodness from the prior 2, should Bungie give it away and say, hey, 3 was the game 2 should have been? GTA 3, Vice City, San Andreas, how many ways can you crash and car and murder a Hooker, are we saying RockStar did not have the right to milk an existing franchise? And the mother of all sequel making franchises, Street Fighter!! You have the World Warriors, Turbo, New Challengers, Alpha, Alpha II, Alpha III (my personal fav), III, III thrid strike, I could go on all day on the number of sequels and variations produced, oh, and Capcom vs. Marvel, and 2, all basicly updates on a popular existing idea. Guess what, sequels fuel the game industry, if something is popular, if it sells, you milk the content until people grow tired of it, or in the case of Sega, do something retarded and try to make Sonic work in 3D.
Point being, in games, sequels that add a slight thin coat of paint to an existing idea are as common as opinions on the Icrontic forum. Are we suggesting that Valve does not deserve a slice of the Pie that so many developers milk over and over again? Why not call EA out for nabbing $59.99 yearly for a Roster update (I'm sorry, no amount of fancy marketing in the world can convince me that Tiberon is doing anything truly innovative). Lets ask Capcom to give each one of us that spent on numerous Street Fighter and Mega Man games a freebie because we got it coming. But Valve?? Don't gamers have bigger fish to fry?
Ignoring Madden, since they're a freak of nature, does anybody put these sequels out within a year of the original?
That's all anybody's saying. They want the content Valve promised them, and the lifetime of a normal game, not some release candidate. We bought a normal game; let it live like a normal game.
Yeah, Valve makes quality games and sells them for much lower than a lot of worse games out there. They COULD charge sixty bucks per game and still make a killing, but they make them 40, 30, 20, etc.
L4D2 has SO MUCH MORE than L4D! new characters, levels, zombies, weapons, better AI, and the game has only just been announced. Patching the classic L4D with all this stuff would take a very long time, and an x-pack would cost money AND require anyone who doesn't own the original L4D and wants these features to buy it.
Snark - It's pretty obvious you don't play sports games. EVERY sports franchise craps out a new game yearly. Just as an example... go to Google product search and search for MLB 09, then MLB 08, 07, etc. There's a different game released each year and there really is little difference between besides roster changes. Occasionally they add a new game mode. Still, much less new content than L4D2 offers and nobody whines and complains about that.
I disagree... If sports games can release new games just for roster changes without being criticized then I think the L4D2 complaints ring hollow given that there are major updates, much more than I'd ever expect out of a free upgrade or expansion pack. Roster updates and team ratings, that's the kind of thing that's perfect for upgrades/expansions because it's just minor changes. All new weapons, a whole new class of weapons, a major update to the AI engine that runs the games, new characters, entirely new zombie skins and more types of special zombie? That doesn't say expansion pack to me, it says sequel.
My point was simply that there's no comparison between recurring yearly sports games - those KNOWN, for a fact, to refresh their game yearly, and the suckers that buy them every year - and your standard fare for computer or console games.
When was the last time that a supposed major title had a sequel released inside a year?
Serious Sam wasn't a major title. It was the token gift game bundled with select video cards!
Thrax are you suggesting that Serious Sam was not a major leap forward in shooter design? A game with a meat head hero sporting a blond flat top, and shooting massive hordes of aliens, mostly while backpedaling?
Serious Sam was a revolution in shooter design!! (yes, I am kidding)
Okay, I have a real argument this time, and frankly, one that your not going to be able to avoid a fair comparison on.
Call of Duty 4, immensely popular, and a damn fine game, and a community driven online shooter experience. Call of Duty World at War, released exactly one year after 4, while 4 was still immensely popular and had a huge community (I think it was still the most played game on XBL, and it was #2 on PC behind WOW).
Are we saying the Call of Duty 4 community should be crying a river over the fact that World at War probably split part of their community??
Call of Duty 4, immensely popular, and a damn fine game, and a community driven online shooter experience. Call of Duty World at War, released exactly one year after 4, while 4 was still immensely popular and had a huge community (I think it was still the most played game on XBL, and it was #2 on PC behind WOW).
Are we saying the Call of Duty 4 community should be crying a river over the fact that World at War probably split part of their community??
A) Two different dev teams make up competing Call of Duty streams - Treyarch and Infinity Ward. IW makes the Modern Warfare series, which can easily be considered a different game series compared to the WWII-centric Treyarch-developed Call of Duty 3/World at War/etc. B) Due to the differences in game dynamic (WWII vs Modern Warfare), the audiences for the games are very segregated - those that like WWII gaming like WaW, those that don't like MW.
A) Two different dev teams make up competing Call of Duty streams - Treyarch and Infinity Ward. IW makes the Modern Warfare series, which can easily be considered a different game series compared to the WWII-centric Treyarch-developed Call of Duty 3/World at War/etc. B) Due to the differences in game dynamic (WWII vs Modern Warfare), the audiences for the games are very segregated - those that like WWII gaming like WaW, those that don't like MW.
Next?
- Some folks, there's just no reasoning with....
Okay, I have you now. Unreal Tournament 2003, then 2004.
Its basically the same game with a new mode thrown in, and some vehicles, developed by the same developer - Epic, and we were promised cross play between 2003 and 2004 for the same DM maps and such, but that did not happen because of "complexities with the net code" I purchased 2003, and no, I did not stage a boycott when 2004 came out, I paid full price. So is Epic guilty as charged? Should we be taking this up with them as well? Thats a fair comparison, why werent people absolutely up in arms about it then? Why is Valve held to a higher standard than famed PC develper Epic?
Yeah, you should probably be pissed at them, too. Valve is more widely loved and talked about than Epic, though; they're probably just a victim of their own awesomeness.
Cliff_Forster
Icrontian
Comments
As far as L4D goes, they got high marks on all accounts. I put in well over 40 hours in the first week of playing the game. That's more playtime than I've gotten out of any game recently. From the looks of L4D2, the updates are so above and beyond there's no realistic way it could possibly be a paid expansion to the original. Managing who has the expansion and who doesn't and making the expansion backwards compatible with non-expansion games would be a bigger headache than it was worth. As for a free upgrade? Please, there was FAR too much work put into this to expect that. If you ask me the boycotters have been spoiled by Valve for so long that they expect everything to be an upgrade for years. They need to grow up and get real. Valve will continue to treat it's customers well, I have no doubt, but a massive update such as this is clearly something that should generate some revenue.
Though I did skim it. If I played L4D, I'd be frustrated that the online play for the two games would be separate.
Er, oh hi, Google.
Also, good article. On the one hand I feel I wrung l4d out of most of its enjoyment factor (I got bored very quickly with it) and I feel I got all i wanted from it, but on the other hand there's that feeling of 'maybe this game was meant to be more and it just needs a little tender developer love'. Who knows.
As a follow up, I would love to get a list of each profile in the group and see if they actually follow through on the boycott when the game comes out.
That is the true test, if you don't like it, don't buy it, but somehow, I am fairly certain 90+% of the people in that group will cave in to the joy of more fast paced Zombie slaying combat, and I am willing to bet they will pay for it.
If you believe Snark on point #5 ;*), hey, we are all defenseless against Valve's evil plan to get us hooked on quality games. They gave us the first taste for cheap, or gasp, in some cases for free!! (gifting from the bundle). According to Snark, Valve is in the business of pushing high quality digital dope. Hey maybe Jay and Silent Bob should man the counter at Steam? We obviously will have no choice but to cave to their alluring addicting product.
Think about it, has Valve ever released a game that was sub-par?
People buy six Guitar Hero games a year at $60 a pop, why are people throwing tantrums when a company well-known for quality games releases a sequel to one of their best games ever with so much more content in it?
I'm sure if Valve could release it as an update or an expansion they would, so why all the crying?
See when MS tells Vista Ultimate owners "Gee sorry about that Ultimate Extras thing but hey you can buy Windows 7!" it's evil MS trying to screw people. But when Valve says "We're making your game obsolete by releasing its expansion pack as a sequel but we'll make dubious promises to keep releasing stuff for the first one." that's just fine and anyone who says otherwise is a whiny loser with an entitlement complex. Right?
Let's try the numbered points.
1. No developer has embraced the mod community? Didn't iD release source code or did I imagine that? What about Stardock and their encouragement of mods? What about Battlefield, what about Unreal, what about... you know what, nevermind, I don't have time to counter the Valve-blinds of all the CS kiddies and HL worshipers on this one.
2. Yes the Steam "community" is free. So is a freaking website! We should be grateful Valve offers a free "community" aka "easy way to constantly spam you to buy our DRM infested games"? Wow gee thanks for that, you are truly the champions of gamers! Now can I play a game without ever needing a net connection, or do I need to go to Xbox for that?
3. Umm I'll deny that a retread BSP and static radiosity engine with some functive physics bolt-ons is "among the greatest games ever made" if you like. Wow, "free deathmatch"! You mean a feature everyone had been expecting from games for years and getting for free with most FPS demos? Wow how generous. Maybe it was released separate because HL1's DM had such crappy net code it got the game slammed in reviews and Valve was still feeling the hurt? And episodic games were supposed to come out for cheap and often, HL2's expansions were neither.
4. Ah yes The Orange Box. AKA "Crap our 'episodic' expansion took way too long to come out and now people are mad so let's throw in this student project and that mod we've been sitting on for 10 years because we realized we should buy CounterStrike instead and then killed it so as not to compete with ourselves!" Crap why do people rave about the out of the box indy game and the sequel to one of the most popular mods of all time and ignore our vastly more expensive to develop expansion pack for our aging flagship game?
5. Portal and TF2 were "only $19.99" if you had HL2. Well gee CounterStrike and TFC were "free" if you had HL1 ten years ago. This is an improvement? No, this is Steam ramming piecemeal sale of game features down our throat with DRM.
6. Yes let's talk about TF2! I love TF2. It's probably my favorite game since TF1, which I played for hours a day and even helped run a clan for. TF1 was the original quake mod, predating even Threewave CTF, and when Valve saw its success they thought they could buy it. So they did, ported it to the heathen TFC on HL with its crappy net code, and started work on TF2. Which was supposed to have this "amazing new engine" that I believe Intel used an alpha of to showcase the value of SSE (by doing tesselation or something). TF2 was going to be this ultra-realistic team based shooter... and then CounterStrike took off and Valve snapped that up. But oops, now they HAVE an ultra-realistic team based shooter! So they don't want to compete with themselves, an sit on TF2 FOR TEN FREAKING YEARS! Eventually it only sees the light of day by piggybacking on the R&D budget for new animation improvements in the engine, and even then only gets released as a "please take this offering and don't be mad at us for our failure at 'episodic content'" offering and is immediately seen as being worth far more than the episode it came with. And the people behind TF and TF2 have fought hard to continually update the game with new maps (taken from the best user-made ones that appear on servers just like TF did) and new weapons (much like how the original TF userbase would mod the mods), and somehow convince Valve NOT to sell them with micropayments or bundle them into a "sequel" or "update pack" that would kill the game.
7. Yes weekly price specials. Someone has re-discovered the basics of economics and that more people will buy an intangible non-need product if it's priced lower than if it's priced higher. Way to go. Now if only they could start showing that draconian DRM like forced online activation only hurts legitimate customers like Stardock has been saying for years and even EA seems to be realizing.
Comparing Valve to Microsoft, come on, seriously??
It's not like making it an expansion will make it any cheaper, anyways. 40 bucks is what a normal expansion pack for a 60 dollar game would retail for new. L4D2 is essentially a stand-alone expansion pack in this sense.
The only problem I see with releasing it as a stand-alone game is needing to switch games to play the original L4D maps.
Snark, do you have an answer for everything
Lets take the whole OS vs. Game argument offline for a second. It will get us nowhere fast, two different animals. Nothing changes that Vista sucked, the L4D does not.
Now, look at the history of game sequels. How many are new level packs for a popular idea? Mega man 1-6, Sonic the Hedgehog 1-3, All the 3D Zelda's change a few things up, but they are variations of the same theme, hell, ID had Quake I and II, then release III as a more realized, polished, and complete multilayer experience that some may have argued should have been an expansion to II. The Metal Gear Solid series feels like a continued variation on the same exact game play. Madden each year. Games based on Pro Wraslin, oh, this years will have more realistic cage physics!! Halo 1-3, 1 innovated console shooters, 2 added online, 3 was just more of the goodness from the prior 2, should Bungie give it away and say, hey, 3 was the game 2 should have been? GTA 3, Vice City, San Andreas, how many ways can you crash and car and murder a Hooker, are we saying RockStar did not have the right to milk an existing franchise? And the mother of all sequel making franchises, Street Fighter!! You have the World Warriors, Turbo, New Challengers, Alpha, Alpha II, Alpha III (my personal fav), III, III thrid strike, I could go on all day on the number of sequels and variations produced, oh, and Capcom vs. Marvel, and 2, all basicly updates on a popular existing idea. Guess what, sequels fuel the game industry, if something is popular, if it sells, you milk the content until people grow tired of it, or in the case of Sega, do something retarded and try to make Sonic work in 3D.
Point being, in games, sequels that add a slight thin coat of paint to an existing idea are as common as opinions on the Icrontic forum. Are we suggesting that Valve does not deserve a slice of the Pie that so many developers milk over and over again? Why not call EA out for nabbing $59.99 yearly for a Roster update (I'm sorry, no amount of fancy marketing in the world can convince me that Tiberon is doing anything truly innovative). Lets ask Capcom to give each one of us that spent on numerous Street Fighter and Mega Man games a freebie because we got it coming. But Valve?? Don't gamers have bigger fish to fry?
That's all anybody's saying. They want the content Valve promised them, and the lifetime of a normal game, not some release candidate. We bought a normal game; let it live like a normal game.
L4D2 has SO MUCH MORE than L4D! new characters, levels, zombies, weapons, better AI, and the game has only just been announced. Patching the classic L4D with all this stuff would take a very long time, and an x-pack would cost money AND require anyone who doesn't own the original L4D and wants these features to buy it.
I was very clearly acknowledging that sports games do yearly refreshes because of the very nature of changing sports teams, rosters, and ratings.
None of those apply to L4D2, so your argument is invalid.
When was the last time that a supposed major title had a sequel released inside a year?
Thrax are you suggesting that Serious Sam was not a major leap forward in shooter design? A game with a meat head hero sporting a blond flat top, and shooting massive hordes of aliens, mostly while backpedaling?
Serious Sam was a revolution in shooter design!! (yes, I am kidding)
Okay, I have a real argument this time, and frankly, one that your not going to be able to avoid a fair comparison on.
Call of Duty 4, immensely popular, and a damn fine game, and a community driven online shooter experience. Call of Duty World at War, released exactly one year after 4, while 4 was still immensely popular and had a huge community (I think it was still the most played game on XBL, and it was #2 on PC behind WOW).
Are we saying the Call of Duty 4 community should be crying a river over the fact that World at War probably split part of their community??
A) Two different dev teams make up competing Call of Duty streams - Treyarch and Infinity Ward. IW makes the Modern Warfare series, which can easily be considered a different game series compared to the WWII-centric Treyarch-developed Call of Duty 3/World at War/etc. B) Due to the differences in game dynamic (WWII vs Modern Warfare), the audiences for the games are very segregated - those that like WWII gaming like WaW, those that don't like MW.
Next?
T [ ] / F [ ]
Okay, I have you now. Unreal Tournament 2003, then 2004.
Its basically the same game with a new mode thrown in, and some vehicles, developed by the same developer - Epic, and we were promised cross play between 2003 and 2004 for the same DM maps and such, but that did not happen because of "complexities with the net code" I purchased 2003, and no, I did not stage a boycott when 2004 came out, I paid full price. So is Epic guilty as charged? Should we be taking this up with them as well? Thats a fair comparison, why werent people absolutely up in arms about it then? Why is Valve held to a higher standard than famed PC develper Epic?
:kneel: