Valve is on a super trolling spree right now with two new pieces of trollware: first up, there is a new countdown website that has gone live, pointing to a date that lands on GamesCom in Cologne, Germany (an event that Valve will be attending by the way), and a new teaser video is vague but somewhat evident in what it's trying to get across and it's that Valve may or may not be able to count to three.
Stick Skills originally spotted the “suspicious” looking URL that countdowns the days to the big reveal. The website, labeled L4D3.ru has the makings of a virus site but is actually plastered in Valve, Steam and Source logos.
According to Stick Skill's Doug Veney, the viral site's information seems to link up with the official Left 4 Dead website.
Quite naturally, regarding viral websites and Valve products, we've seen this sort of thing before only to find out that the entire event was a leg-pull from the good folks at Valve and ended up in nothing more than a wild geek chase.
However, additional information has also been kicked over and out of the can that has led many to publicly believe that something truly is inbound. DSO Gaming spotted a new video from Valve's Marc Laidlaw who posted a video on Vine simply saying “Dare I?” with his finger hovering over the '3' button but then quickly moving over to the 'L' button. Check it out below:
Now, realistically, I would easily throw this out of the window... had it just been any single element all by itself. But there is now substantial evidence that something is going down because of a few things all compiled together: First of all, Valve will be attending GamesCom this year. They have a booth on the show floor. Next up, we have that cheap Russian website that would be a throwaway on its own but it arrived just in time with Laidlaw's Vine video.
I don't mean to go off on conspiracy theory here, but look, Valve has been prototyping the Steam Box for the past couple of months. Big Picture Mode is already set. They've rolled out official Linux support. Order 333 could be in effect, people!
However, another part of me believes that things are a lot more simple than that and we could be seeing the announcement of Left 4 Dead 3 for the PS4, Xbox One and PC, as well as the first set of commercial Steam Box packages for a living room PC solution.
I seriously wouldn't count out that Valve has something big planned for GamesCom this year (which is shaping up to be one of the biggest trade show events of the year) and it obviously involves enough viral teasing to get the internet up in arms about it... and I doubt it has anything to do with digital game resales.
