Halo 3's advertisement cost way more than $10 millions I think.

Valve must be pretty confident by letting $10 millions go for L4D, especially when it's being released in just 2 platforms (one less than OB). My 2 cents: When The Orange Box came out it spurred a huge boom on Steam, and added millions of new members and promoted Steam to non-Steam PC gamers. Many of those new members also ended up staying on Steam and started buying other games there too. I think Valve will be counting on that again, and L4D seems to be the perfect game to cause another boom because alot of it's appeal comes from a community, and the only way a PC gamer can be in a millions-based community is on Steam.

I think Valve expects those $10 millions will end up helping both L4D and Steam in the long run.

With Left 4 Dead Valve will be introducing the Matchmaking feature for Steam that'll attract a lot of XBL gamers...being able to quickly join a game with someone based on skill or their record, or whatever. And that'll roll back to TF2 and such too.

So yeah, when L4D comes out, Steam will gain more popularity. I personally can't wait until they bring out Steam Cloud, to have savegames stored online so I can continue a game on any computer I want.

I have never been hot on matchmaking services. I've noticed that getting my ass handed to me nonstop actually ups my skill eventually, skill which I gleefully use on players of lower skill. Though the evenly matched games have always been great. Doesn't really pertain to L4D since it's a coop game, but the whole zombie bosses thing will be quite a lot of fun.

I personally like having regular servers I can join...because if they're clan servers, and if I like playing with them, I can get to know them and I know exactly where to go if I wanted to play with some of them.

With matchmaking, it seems a little more random to me. Of course there's always the Friends list, but yeah. 
For L4D, matchmaking will be nice though...because if you want to play a long campaign with 3 other people, it'd be very nice to be matched up at least a little bit before venturing out...it would suck to get stuck with someone who's going to drop a grenade on your foot.

Also:
http://www.playfuls.com/news_11254_Microsofts_publicity_campaign_for_Halo_3_reaches_a_cost_of_10_million_dollars.html

From a few different links, I read that Halo 3's ad campaign cost about $10 million.
Halo 3 didn't need more than that though, because the extreme hype of it being Halo was plenty.

Wait, are they completely gonna remove searching for servers and will just stick with matchmaking? That would really turn me off steam...

No. It'll just be an additional feature, just like the Community stuff is an additional feature.

Servers are required to play a game, so obviously people will always run servers, and you can always pick a server to play a game. Matchmaking simply takes the emphasis off picking a specific server, and instead picking a server based on who's playing. It's a good idea sometimes.

Ah. Valve (especially Steam) is really keeping my new PC busy.

Can't wait to get my hands on it.

Quick Left 4 Dead question.

will there be any other survivors in the game? People that you can either rescue, or just happen to see get torn to shreds every once and a while?

ah hell, I'll just go and check out some previews.

So it's going to have a fairly average advertising budget for a game with TV ads then.

Oh wait... that's just the UK then?  That's fairly big then.

Not HUGE though... I mean at one point Sony spent like 100 Million on a small core of games advertising wise in the UK... including and even headlined by a 3rd party game.  (FF7.)

This is just across the US from what I gathered.

And again, this is a fairly large ad campaign for one game, nothing unheard of, but definitely big for a Valve game...they don't typically advertise this much.