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Oh please! Has everyone including you forgotten that when valve as an experiment lowered the price of L4D to $2 their PROFITS on that game went up by 1700%?

OK, I'm gonna call BS on that right there. Considering that the marketing budget for L4D was $10 million, and L4D sold 2.5 million copies, at $2 per sale, they couldn't have even covered marketing let alone actually producing the game. Additionally, it counters what valve themselves had said. The cheapest it's ever been on steam was $6.80 not the $2 you claim -- 2 years after initial release, and the numbers weren't all that great. Additionally, 3 million copies were sold at retail, and an additional 3 million were sold for the 360. Total for the entire franchise was 11 million, leaving 5 million for the super bargain basement price deal PLUS L4D2 and DLCs. Even if not a single person bought any DLC or L4D2, it is mathematically impossible for your $6.80 sale to have even gotten close to the revenues made from retail.

http://store.steampowered.com/news/2552/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Left_4_Dead
http://www.l4d.com/blog/

Additionally, the only hit google has for L4D $2 profit, is YOU on another thread, so not only is this BS, but BS that you personally started in another thread. Good job, troll elsewhere.

I know, Bloodlines technically was developed by Troika. Still, mostly the same crew.

Not really. A few people from Troika went to Obsidian initially, but not many stayed long. At this point the biggest concentration is probably at Carbine Studios under Tim Cain, followed by Turtle Rock where experience with the Source Engine paid off in the making of Left 4 Dead. If you take a look at a recent L4D blog post you can definitely see how much the early screen shots looked like Vampire -- not surprising considering some of the same lighting/level/texture people did them. (I was lead programmer on Vampire. You can ultimately blame most of the bugs on one very bad decision, by me, very early in the project. I chose an architecture for the scripting system that gave us more flexibility than we needed at the price of easy testing and validation. That's another story, though.)

Wait... since when does WoW focus on "casual" gamers? I'm sorry, but a game that I have to play often just too feel that I have made my 15$/month worthwhile isn't what I call "casual".

Pumping in hour after hour just to get your character to the level cap and then even more hours coordinating a large scale assault on a creature just to get the left boot of butt-kicking just to restart the next day and hope that you'll get the right boot that time and not a 2nd left one is FAR from casual gaming... that sounds pretty hardcore to me...

As for the casual game numbers being higher... perhaps that's because those games were actually more fun? Besides GTA IV, was there anything else "harcore" of note last year? People don't buy hardcore games, they buy GOOD hardcore games.

Yeah, last year had Left 4 Dead

And then an other genre comes flying out of an air duct or dark corner!

I would say Left 4 Dead fits that bill nicely. It has some of the survival horror basics, but in a fun, fast-paced, co-op, action way.

I'm kind of surprised that the Kotaku story didn't mention Left4Dead, which I have the impression will be a really good survival horror game.

Left 4 Dead, Valve's latest creation, is being marketed as a survival horror co-op FPS. With zombies. Does that count? It looks good, but we'll see.

I think these guys are doing the same thing, but it sounds a little more thought out. The wikipedia article on left4dead is a good overview.