Beginning Friday at 12:01 am GMT, the PC version of Left 4 Dead will be available for a free 24-hour trial via Steam. The free trial will include access to the recently released Survival Pack DLC, which introduces a new multiplayer game mode and two additional Versus campaigns. Those who wish to give L4D and the Survival Pack a try may now pre-load everything needed to play with no obligation to purchase.

Cannot.go.wrong

These days with console online connectivity being available right out of the box, systems such as Achievements, Trophies and Steam all provide accessible solutions for developers and publishers to gather some insightful data, stats, on their respective communities and player gaming habits.

Some forward thinking when deciding how achievements and Trophies are awarded, can provide some insightful data once a game is released, and in the hands of the player. What map is most popular? What percentage of people play on difficulty X? What percentage of people have purchased downloadable content? What percentage of people actually finish the game? All of these are pretty straight forward to track, and with a little creativity, more specific data could be tapped into also, which in turn could (and should IMO) influence and feed into the decision making process about what direction possible sequels and updates could take.

Anyway, back on to the stats. Ive been revisiting giantbomb.com over the last couple of days, as I’ve decided to give their podcast a go after several recommendations, particularly now that the 1up series of podcasts are to be no more.

Browsing giantbomb.com I noticed a link to the blog of Robert Bowling – AKA Fourzerotwo – Director of Communications/Community Manager over at Infinity Ward. He recently posted some interesting stats for Call of Duty 4, after hitting a mammoth 10,006,606 unique users who have ever played on CoD4 on Xbox 360 and have connected to Xbox Live at least once:

That number got us curious as to how many of those 10 Million+users finished the F.N.G. mission, or beat Airplane on Veteran (among other things). Well, it turns out:

71.1%, or 7,111,508 people have completed F.N.G. – That’s more than the entire population of Hong Kong (which is 7 Million).

68.8%, or 6,886,509 people have completed Cargo Ship. – This is the same number of adults in the US who were morbidly obese in 2005.

46.5%, or 5,654,643 people have beaten the game on any difficulty. – This is more than the current population of Finland!

2.8%, or 283,632 people have completed Airplane on Veteran difficulty. – The population of Stockton, CA is 280,000.

So if you have one of these on your gamercard:

You can sleep sound in the knowledge your are in the 2.8% of players around the world who have achieved such a feat (well at least of those players connected to Live) Additionally if you managed to finish the first level (Cargo Ship) you can also proudly say you are not in the 31.2% who didn’t.

A few of the members of the l337sheet right here actually have their own wiki page on giantbomb by the way, head on over to the site, go to the search box and enter you name to see if you there!