The 27th Annual Golden Joystick Awards are now accepting votes for your favorite game of the year. Now, we'd of course never for a second want to sway your vote and suggest you follow this link and vote for Left 4 Dead. We're above that sort of thing.

Today we are opening the beta of the Left 4 Dead Authoring Tools to the public. It is available as a free download for all owners of the PC version of Left 4 Dead, and can be found under the "Tools" tab in Steam.

Valve has always seen the value in gathering real-world gameplay data and using it to improve our products. Now we're hoping you'll find it as useful as we do. With the creation of the L4D stats page, our customers will now be able to see a wide variety of gameplay data across all of Left 4 Dead's various game modes.

We just released the DLC on the PC and 360. This includes the new Survival Mode, The Lighthouse Survival map, and 2 new Versus campaigns. To celebrate the release of the DLC we have cooked up a few items for the Valve Store.

Survival Mode pits your team against never ending waves of infected. Sounds simple. Just trap the survivors in a small part of a map, unleash the hordes, and record the longest time. Survival Mode, which will be released next week, is actually a bit more than that.

Hello. My name is Jeremy Bennett, and I'm an artist at Valve. Most gamers only ever get to see the finished product of a game cover, so we thought some of you might find it interesting to hear the process that led to Left 4 Dead's final art. As you'll see, there were quite a few attempts along the way, all of them eventually abandoned.

In a recent update for L4D on the PC, we provided the option for players to choose between starting a game on an Official server or the Best Available. This is just the first step in giving players control over what servers they play on and the type of experience they have.

We recently updated the PC version of Left 4 Dead with some exploit fixes and Versus balancing. We are going to be releasing another small update shortly that contains some server issue fixes and one small, but very large, gameplay adjustment. We have made a change to the melee mechanic in Versus and the soon-to-be-released Survival Mode.

With 2008 behind us, the gaming press has once again sorted through the year's releases and made up their annual lists for Game of the Year. Find out how Left 4 Dead ranks with IGN, GameSpot, GameSpy, 1UP, Onion AV Club, Destructoid, Kotaku, Team XBOX and more by clicking here.

Aesthetics, fiction and gameplay: these are three criteria that we always consider when employing a new art direction for a game. With a game as dark as Left 4 Dead, this meant having to figure out a lot of new ways to use the absence of light to our advantage.