As part of the release of Left 4 Dead, Valve is offering a pretty sweet deal. If you buy three copies of the game you get one free essentially. Since the game is designed for cooperative play this makes a lot of sense. Also since you can gift games on steam it makes it entirely possible that three people could go together and buy it on one account and then give them back to the other accounts.

If nothing else this shows that valve is absolutely committed to the idea of cooperative play on the PC platform. Since consoles have a much easier time of doing a whopper of online play via the services such as Xbox Livethose games tend to have intelligent cooperative play built-in as almost a standard feature anymore. For example, Halo 3 had fantastic cooperative play that work through the entire campaign. In fact it even worked over the Internet which proves that online co-op or to play can work and a game like left for dead is absolutely perfectly suited for cooperative play. It’s actually designed around it.

I’ve even been reading that the game’s single player is not nearly as good as the cooperative play in the cooperative play is how was actually designed and intended to be played. Thus, Valve offering this deal is not only brilliant but perhaps even necessary to the future of PC gaming as a platform that can compete favorably with console gaming.