Why Left 4 Dead 3 Will Never Happen

When looking back at Valve's impressive portfolio, most fans signal sci-fi first-person shooter Half-Life as the very best the studio has ever had to offer. But the truth is that, while the Half-Life series might be one of the company's peak accomplishments, it's only one of quite a few iconic properties. Valve is also responsible for the Portal games, Counter-Strike, Team Fortress 2, Dota 2, not to mention the Steam platform that makes the studio billions of dollars a year.

Then there's the little zombie game that could: Left 4 Dead, one of a few projects on Valve's roster not originally conceived by the developer. It was Turtle Rock Studios, who you might also know for the asymmetrical 4v1 monster shooter Evolve, who first came up with the idea for Left 4 Dead while working on Counter-Strike: Source for Valve. The game was originally planned as a mod for Counter-Strike called Terror, but Turtle Rock decided to take the idea even further after watching zombie film 28 Days Later, choosing instead to create an original title.

Left 4 Dead was officially announced in 2006 and Turtle Rock was acquired by Valve in 2008. The rest is gruesome, zombie-killing history. A sequel, Left 4 Dead 2, arrived in 2009, only a year after the original.

Unfortunately, we've not heard much about the series since. Will Left 4 Dead 3 ever arrive? Here are a few reasons Valve will probably never return to the franchise.

Either way, popularity has never been enough to send Valve into a development frenzy. If Valve had listened to all the fans who have begged for Half-Life 3 over the years, we'd probably be on Half-Life 7 by now. Valve doesn't seem to care whether a franchise is still in the public consciousness (although it probably does help a little) or not. Indeed, after all those years of the internet making noise about the elusive Half-Life 3, the game has never really even existed at the studio beyond a few false starts.

So, even if fans were about to knock Valve president Gabe Newell's door down with requests for Left 4 Dead 3, it could very well mean nothing to the studio. According to Newell, while talking to Geoff Keighley in a podcast in 2015 (via Polygon), Valve would need a very good reason to revisit one of its old franchises.

"The only reason we'd go back and do like a super classic kind of product is if a whole bunch of people just internally at Valve said they wanted to do it and had a reasonable explanation for why [they did]," Newell explained.

Justifying a new entry series that hasn't had a new installment in almost a decade might be too difficult.

Another reason Valve might not be into exploring a new Left 4 Dead sequel is that there are already too many similar games on the market. When the first Left 4 Dead launched in 2008, it arrived at the advent of four-player co-op PvE shooters and there wasn't that much like it on consoles, except Call of Duty: World at War's Nazi Zombies mode and Gears of War 2's Horde mode. Plenty of other Horde modes and cooperative PvE shooters followed in Left 4 Dead's footsteps, though.

Today, there are so many co-op shooters to choose from that they might be deterring Valve from trying to penetrate a saturated genre. Not only does Call of Duty still release yearly Zombies modes, but games like Strange Brigade, Earthfall, and Warhammer: Vermintide 2 have added new spins on the gameplay Left 4 Dead helped popularize. These days, a new Left 4 Dead would have to bring something new to the table to stand out. That seems like more of an effort than Valve would be willing to make considering it doesn't even need to make new games.

While it's true that the developer might not be interested in jumping into a genre saturated with titles, it has followed popular trends when deciding what games to make.

MOBAs, for example, became tremendously popular in the late 2000s, thanks to League of Legends, which was itself inspired by a mod called Defense of the Ancients for Warcraft 3: Reign of Chaos. If the popularity of League of Legends wasn't enough to convince Valve to get in on the MOBA business while it was hot, the $624 million Riot Games made in 2013 definitely did. That same year, Valve launched Dota 2, a sequel to Defense of the Ancients, after two years of beta testing.

Valve followed a similar pattern VR. The company released its first VR experience, The Lab, in 2016 to coincide with the launch of the HTC Vive headset. In 2017, the company announced that it was working on three VR games, further showing its interest in adopting the popular gaming tech. These days, the studio is even developing its own VR controllers.

Most recently, Valve has turned its eye toward the popular CCG genre, which is currently dominated by Hearthstone. Valve will release Artifact in November.

Long story short, Valve likes to strike while the iron's hot on a new trend. Team-based co-op zombie shooters are old news and not worth the company's efforts.

While there's nothing in the Valve handbook that actually states that the company doesn't do threequels, it's hard not to notice that the studio is at least a tiny bit opposed to making third entries. We're not just talking about Left 4 Dead 3 here. Valve hasn't made Dota 3 (because Dota 2 is still going strong), Team Fortress 3, Portal 3, or the mythical Half-Life 3.

Surely, there's money to be made with any of these sequels. Portal 2, for example, had sold more than 4 million units by 2012, just a year after its launch, according to Eurogamer. Most publishers would take that success and spin it into a third entry and perhaps even a fourth. But not Valve. Because it's allergic to the number 3.

If there's any chance of Left 4 Dead 3 ever seeing the light of day, it'll have to contend against Valve's long history of ignoring threequels. But don't bet on it.