You WILL buy Left 4 Dead 2, dammit

Is anybody out there still boycotting Left 4 Dead 2? If so, two things:

1. You’re ridiculous.
2. Valve intends to test your resistance with the mother of all marketing campaigns.

That’s right: Valve has announced it’ll be spending a cool $25 million pushing the sequel to its utterly brilliant zombie co-op shooter.

That means billboards, banner ads on gaming sites, and televised advertisements that run during Monday Night Football and UFC events. Noice. Over in Europe, there’ll be more of everything, with extra print, television, and website ads. In Australia, that means … oh.

Anyway, I guess we can put all of this down to the wild success of the first game, which is fast approaching 3 million sales on all formats, largely thanks to a glowing critical reception and word-of-mouth recommendations.

Left 4 Dead 1‘s ad budget of $10 million is dwarfed by the campaign for the follow-up, and I for one am glad to see the game getting the big push it deserves.

[Via press release]