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Valve Pleased With Left 4 Dead DLC Reception

Tom Ivan's picture

By Tom Ivan

April 22, 2009

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Valve's VP of marketing Doug Lombardi has told Edge that the company’s pleased with the initial performance of the Left 4 Dead Survival Pack DLC.

The DLC, which launched yesterday for Xbox 360 and PC, introduces a new multiplayer game mode entitled Survival, plus two complete campaigns for the title’s Versus Mode.

“… From what we’ve seen on the forums, in the press, and the gamers we met on public servers this morning, folks seem to be enjoying it so far,” he said. “Meanwhile, the concurrent player numbers are already up from their recent averages. So positive indicators thus far.”

The downloadable content market is increasingly lucrative - Activision’s Call of Duty: World at War map pack, which retails for £6.80/$9.99, was downloaded more than one million times during its first weekend of availability – which makes it refreshing that Valve opted not to charge for the Survival Pack.

“Releasing new content free of charge has made sense to us on many occasions,” explained Lombardi. “We have, however, released commercial add on packs and new episodes in the past. We evaluate these decisions on a case-by-case basis. The Survival Pack was a case where we felt like it made a lot of sense for the product and community to make it available free of charge to both Xbox 360 and PC customers and we were able to work through that plan with Microsoft.”

Lombardi also said that the zombie shooter won’t be turning up on PlayStation 3 any time soon, noting that “there’s no L4D production work happening on the PS3 at the moment.”

SunKing's picture
On April 23rd SunKing said:

The content is good for a free product, but now there seem to be more players than servers. It's incredibly difficult to get a survival game going, and the matchmaking still sucks.

carg0's picture
On April 22nd carg0 said:

i don't know who he's been playing with but the concensus from everyone i've played with so far has been that of indifference, added with constant complaints of why at least 1 new campaign wasn't added.

i've already lost track of how many times i heard people say they would've preferred paid content if it included a new campaign. i found it amusing to hear so many gamers of the same opinion for once.

'survivor mode' isn't bad but i won't go so far as to call it good. it's a diversion, nothing more. unfortunately, it gets old fast. you won't exactly be tripping over yourself to play it the following day, if ever again.