99% of fans will buy L4D2? By fans do you mean people that play it regularly or everyone that bought L4D? There's no way L4D2 can outsell L4D. A lot of people bought L4D and had a great time but never picked it up again because friends lost interest and there weren't enough people to play with. It's not as much a game you can just play a round of and quit. It's a campaign you have to coordinate with friends. Do you think people that bought the game intending to play it a lot but never being able to due to friends not being up to it and thus the purchase feeling like it was bit a waste to spend 50 dollars on (especially with the relatively low amount of content for the price and lack of developer support would look at L4D2 and say hmm I'm willing to spend another 50 dollars on this sequel?

If you were disappointed with the lack of support in the first place after the first game's relative lack of content, why would you buy a sequel at full price? I was 100% excited for L4D before it came out and it was a sure purchase for me. Now I'm not even sure I'll pick up L4D2. Maybe if it's good. If the hype is this low for someone like me who buys a lot of games, how will the more casual player that bought L4D feel about it? A lot of them probably won't even care about it. L4D sold well because of the excitement it drew with the hype surrounding it. I'm not so sure the sequel can generate that same kinda of hype. It'd be like if they made a TF3 a year after TF2. It it just won't sell as well.

As for them committing to adding new content to L4D. Sure you can assume they will because they said so. I'm sure they will support it. But to what extent? Can you play L4D maps on L4D2? Probably not. But how will new maps work? Can either group of survivors do the same scenarios? Can you mix and match? How much dialogue interactions would have to be done to facilitate that? I'm just going to assume that the new content will be per game rather than cover both. That is assuming Valve actually makes new maps with new voice acting for the map events. Also why should we be calm about the eventual committed content for L4D rather than be annoyed that they are working on a sequel than actually making new content right now. I should be annoyed that I expected them to make new content right away but they went off and made a sequel instead so I have to wait longer to play new stuff long after my friends lost interest in the game. It really seems like a betrayal for the sake of the dollar. I can see their point of view but it really comes off as a shit on the fans that committed to the first game, especially people that actually went and bought servers for the first game.

If there's still a market to be had, console makers aren't going anywhere. We are reaching a point where graphics can't get that much better visually. Physics and other processing is becoming the big factor in games. I just can't see them adding GPUs and powerful processors in TVs. Also, having games in VR glasses would remove a lot of the social aspect of console gaming.

I can see this happening with PC gaming (it's already starting) but saying it'll replace consoles is kinda silly unless you're talking about 20 years from now, which we really can't predict at this very moment.

Why does a cumulative gamerscore matter? I think more people would rather care more about achievements within a specific game to be a completionist. Look at Valve's achievements. They are fairly popular yet there's no cumulative score. I think people are too stuck in this Microsoft point of view where what they do is the right way to do it. That's silly.

I think a lot of people are missing the point here. I don't disagree that people care about achievements. Microsoft's trying to spin achievements as something that drives sales. As in a game with good achievements will sell a lot better than the same game with worse achievements, which is hard to prove but likely isn't true. Game sales are driven by good marketing and more importantly good development. The latter of those two often leads to good achievements as the developers put time and thought into the game and its achievements.

Everyone talking about achievements being a waste of time or the fact that they care about achievements are completely going off the main topic here. That's not really the issue. It's obvious people like achievements, else why would Blizzard and Valve start including them in their systems? The question is whether or not they actually drive sales, which I'm pretty doubtful of.

I feel like they are trying to find causation in this correlation. It could easily be that games that sell better are often more well developed, and therefore have better achievements. It doesn't mean that a game with achievements will sell better than the same game without.