Boycott: From the other side

October 7, 2009 by Tim

I’ve exchanged a few emails with Walking_Target, one of the leaders of the L4D2 Boycott, and he expressed some concerns that I was focusing too much on the vocal contingent of the boycott that is trying to get free content, and not enough on what he states as their primary issue here, and that is “promised-but-not-delivered support” from Valve.

And I understand that that is one of the main complaints here, however I still need to disagree with the entire thing.

What people are saying to me is “We didn’t get the DLC and support Valve promised us”, however nobody seems to be able to quantify exactly what and how much stuff Valve supposedly promised.

Right now, this looks to me like if someone were to say “Hey, I’ll give you some money if you sign up for my newsletter”, and you sign up, and the guy gives you $5, and you get angry because you were hoping for $20. Yeah, it sucks that you didn’t get what you were hoping for, but the terms of the agreement were filled to the letter in my eyes.

I get that Valve said they were going to create DLC for the game. I see DLC delivered. Maybe not as much as you were hoping to get, but it’s there, and since they didn’t promise X number of updates (that I’ve ever seen) their portion of the deal is fulfilled.

I get that the game still has some bugs. I haven’t seen any statement from Valve that it won’t still try to fix them, that L4D is instantly kicked to the curb on L4D2 release day. However these aren’t bugs that have prevented you from using and enjoying your paid-for-product. Annoyances you’d like to see fixed, sure. But the game isn’t unplayable.

Hell, World of Warcraft recently announced that they’re currently tracking and working on, like, a million bugs or something. You don’t see players boycotting Starcraft 2 until these are fixed.

What I’m saying is, I hear you, boycotters. I have listened to and understand your issues from multiple sources, not only mainstream media. I hear you, I just happen to strongly disagree with you and your approach.


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