Left 4 Dead 2 is free right now on steam | Hacker News Reader

Left 4 Dead 2 is free right now on steam

store.steampowered.com

44 pointsddorian4323 comments

Ah, that explains why they've been DDOSed for a couple hours now.

edit: I'm not implying that Steam is being attacked, here I intend to say that the DDOS is organically driven by high demand for the content.

Are you sure they are getting attacked? Is there a status posting somewhere that reflects that assumption?

It's more likely that their servers are overloaded from the number of users trying to grab L4D2 along with the other winter sale items. Steam store has been iffy the past couple of days already.

Definitely being hit hard by legitimate users. It's always bad during steam sales, but things like this put it over capacity.

The non official Steam status page

http://steamstat.us/

(But even the Dota matchmaking is down right now)

I didn't say it was an attack. It's a distributed denial of service via demand for the service rather than malicious intent.

edit: Perhaps I should have said "organically DDOSed" or something to that effect to better signal that I was using the term in a casual manner somewhat divorced from its malicious origin.

Valve coming with a _real_ growth hack.

I'm putting this one over the Orange box.

Their announcement said you have to install it. I wonder if that has anything to do with their servers being overloaded at the moment. It's a sizable download.

You don't _have to_ install it and finish it. Just start installing to add to your account.

I wonder if an influx of gamers will spur valve devs to work on the game, like with CSGO

L4D2 is four years old. In that time, Valve added an absurd amount of updates (including the implementation of the entire L4D1 campaign).

Valve had basically offered it for $5 every Steam sale for the past few years so this is a mercy gift. (as with Portal last year)

But it is still the only competitive game of its nature, and it plays like any game released recently.

So unless Valve intends on releasing L4D3 any time soon, I think it would be great if they put more work into L4D2.

In addition, keep in mind this is the game they chose to demo the feasibility of gaming on Linux.

The last few DLCs have just been good community campaigns that Valve has reworked slightly, I don't see why they wouldn't keep adding more when it's little work for them.

Even if they don't it's very easy to get custom campaigns in the game yourself.

I'm not worried about new content. Steam Workshop makes that a non-issue.

But there can definitely be some work done on netcode and various gameplay glitchy issues.

L4D3 is already in development. Based on how long the second game took to make, 2014 seems realistic.

/me crosses fingers

Pretty sure Left 4 Dead 2 is the next free-to-play for Valve and this is an initial test. They are probably adding items and upgrades soon, but they do it very tastefully like in TF2 and CS.

They probably have a growth curve that starts initially as a pay game, then on taper, open it up, then add in items/content and the markets. Very smart and they have done them one at a time. The markets and goods actually make the game fun to go back to and don't bend game balancing too much, but add a layer of fun. They are pretty much the model for good in-app purchases on desktop.

No, if anything goes F2P in the near future is CSGO. It's already have items, market, growing community, huge competitive scene... etc. And it's updated weekly (unlike L4D2)

That's a great marketing strategy. They don't lose any money because the game is developed in house and in return they get an influx in traffic on a day when a lot of people just received a lot of money as a gift. Well played Valve.

That assumes the Steam Store is up and running accepting orders. But since it's down due to the amount of traffic caused by this promotion, they're losing quite a bit of money right now.

And their servers are overloaded.

This is great but I don't understand why this broke other properties. E.g., when this announcement went out, the dota2 matchmaking service fell over. Very frustrating.

Maybe some of the infrastructure is shared (i.e. the pipes that serve L4D2 downloads also services Dota2)

Does any of the consoles have free AAA games?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com