Hell hath no fury like a gamer scorned. Earlier this week at Microsoft's E3 press conference it was announced that Valve was working on a sequel to the bestselling zombie game Left4Dead. Fans of the original were surprised to hear that Left4Dead 2 was expected to launch on November 17th, barely a year after the first game was released.

Surprisingly, this ticked off a lot of people. Many Valve fans felt that this was a way for the company to brush off Left4Dead and ignore the list of updates and improvements they promised fans when the game was released. In order to protest the sequel and guilt Valve into supporting the original title fans formed the group “Left4Dead 2 Boycott”. They have already gathered 4,500 members.

Valve has issued no response to the boycott as of yet, and I honestly don't expect them to. The boycotters are in the right, but there just aren't enough of them to make Valve flinch. Hopefully we'll see a snowball effect here and they'll actually get some of their issues addressed in a patch; that's about the best outcome possible.

Game developers like Valve have a nasty tendency to forget all about promises they made to fans and their duty to support current content when the potential to make a boatload of money comes along. Creating a second Left4Dead will split the fan base and pretty much guarantee the death of content expansion on the original, but it will also be extraordinarily profitable. Valve has a cash cow on their hands, why would they stop harvesting money to worry about their fans?