Earlier today, Alvin Wang Graylin, President of HTC China, shared a few slides from a recent talk on the future of VR, which stated that "Valve HL Alyx/LFD3 will drive consumer and AAA studio interest." Alarm bells went off. While the acronym was incorrect, the reference to Left 4 Dead 3 was clear.

There was initial excitement - surely a high-ranking HTC executive must have inside information about this sort of thing, right? -but it was all very thin, and out of nowhere, people quickly started theorizing that Graylin's source was actually the highly speculative Valve News Network site, and that theory was reinforced by this tweet in December 2019.

It seemed odd that HTC's president would make such a statement based solely on a VNN report, but his other bullet points were also quite pictorial: for example, "AR/VR connected to a 24/7 AI cloud will make humans super intelligent," or that "older people will use VR to re-enter the workforce and Travel."

Whether these predictions are accurate or inaccurate, the predictions about Left 4 Dead 3 are surely off the mark.

"We have been seeing these rumors for months now. We had explored the possibility of a next Left 4 Dead movie a few years ago. However, we are absolutely not currently working on anything related to L4D and haven't for years," Valve said in a statement sent to IGN.

"It is clear that some people enjoy creating misinformation to inflame the community and other sources. Unfortunately, at this time a new L4D is not something we are working on."

Sorry, folks. However, if you like leaks and rumors, you can find a summary of the various rumors and stories about Left 4 Dead 3 here.