https://www.altchar.com/game-news/crazy-rumour-suggests-microsoft-are-preparing-16-billion-offer-for-valve-aZBCt4A5QXEy
X user Dior dropped a bombshell that Microsoft are preparing an offer of $16 billion in cash to buy Valve including their assets and IP.
As long as valve say no then they can offer all they like. That is the advantage of not being a publicly traded company!
Looking at the sales estimates, the numbers appear pretty modest compared to the other gaming devices. They’re probably under 5m units sold since early 2022.
EA is worth several times that and they don't have the #1 PC games platform or any hardware
Valve should at least be in the same ballpark
Yeah, just saying that most of Valve’s value is probably in their software. Their hardware installed base is pretty small compared to others.
Yes, shares. Employee Stock Ownership Plans are a thing, they're private shares in the company.
Oh thank miscellaneous diety. For fucks sake everything Microsoft touches turns to shit, especially when it comes to game platforms.
Considering Valve is one of the biggest backers of Linux that would be horrible (ofc it's ai generated nonsense).
The "source" otherwise does nothing but give away cosmetic in-game items if you subscribe and tag a friend on X.
Imagine a timeline where this happens.
What if there was an open source Steam clone, where everything is federated, and you could add repos like on KDE Discover, GNOME Software or F-DROID's Android client?
This would be awesome.
It would be!
The big issue would be getting game developers onboard. The service valve provides is both to developers and to consumers.
The appeal to developers is that they can toss the game on steam and valve will manage putting it in front of players and getting them to buy it, and all the associated payment processing that entails.
Developers like steam because it has all the users and does a good job of "based on your games, buy these too".
Users like it because it has all the games, installation is inevitably trivial, and it does a good job offering them games they could plausibly like, often on sale, and there's a feeling of platform security: valve won't screw you over.
Any new distribution system will have a tough time breaking in. Just look at the difficulties epic has had despite giving away games constantly and offering extremely generous developer revenue shares.
Valve aimed to make steam $30-60 dollars more convenient than piracy, and that seems to extend to other forms of free as well.
First step is figuring out secure decentralized credit card payments. 😊
Imagine plugging Flathub into this as a starting point. Also, if everything is federated, developers could sell directly. That's one way to get them onboard.
Well, I don't think they're interested in selling directly. There's a lot of overhead in handling credit card payments and dealing with the jurisdictional issues of sales tax, currency conversion, and regional age and content restrictions.
Your notion sounds perfectly lovely from the consumer side, but from the creator side it's not much different from not using the system at all.
Yes. But those would be able to chose whatever distributor fits them better. Humble, GOG, itchio, whatever... For the user it would all be the same.
I could see a federated recommendation engine/ranking system/the social parts of game ownership, but I just don't see it panning out for the actual commerce part.
Those parts benefit from being able to control your own data and who it's shared with. I don't think there's a reasonable way to federate giving a specific individual money and them authorizing you to download or access a resource they control.
Tinfoil Hat Time:
Linux Gaming, while increasingly viable, isn't currently a threat to MS. There are enough reasons people will stick with Windows. But Valve are doing a good job of showing that it's possible, that Microsoft's hold on PC gaming isn't absolute and that an increasing number of games are playable on Linux too (with the right tools). Wine and co. have been around for a while, but they never enjoyed the spotlight of a major videogame platform investing time and manpower into developing a dedicated gaming compatibility engine.
I don't think MS would intentionally run it into the ground. They'd probably try to squeeze it for money, which might end up doing so anyway.
I also don't think they're really worried about Linux gaming. But I also doubt they'd leave Proton untouched entirely. Whether they'd kneecap it, whether they'd enshittify it, whether they'd work on interfacing it with their proprietary stuff in an attempt to put it ahead of any competition and tip potential Linux Gaming developments in favour of using their engine to more easily target both platforms at once, I doubt they could resist doing something to squeeze money from it.
Maybe the very idea that they're challenging Microsoft's supremacy is unpleasant to them. Maybe their analytics show enough of a trend to concern them. Maybe they just want to make sure they have a piece of the pie if it ever becomes worth something.
Or maybe the whole thing is baseless bullshit made up for attention and site traffic.
Do you think Gabe would even raise an eyebrow for such a pocket money offer? Or would he actually find enough effort to laugh at it?
Gabe used to work for Microsoft, I can't imagine he's eager to repeat.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gabe_Newell
"He attended Harvard University in the early 1980s but dropped out to join Microsoft, where he helped create the first versions of the Windows operating system. He and another employee, Mike Harrington, left Microsoft in 1996 to found Valve, and funded the development of their first game, Half-Life (1998). Harrington left in 2000."
Well... good thing I've been buying what I can through GOG... but this is terrible news, especially with the way Microsoft has been shutting down gaming studios recently.
Edit: meh, this just sounds like clickbait:
- The leak comes from an unknown and unreliable source in the gaming industry.
- Microsoft's acquisition of Activision Blizzard faced regulatory challenges, making the merger with Valve unlikely.
Plus they are bleeding money from all the acquisitions and haven't seen the return they expected in game pass subs. The cost cutting isn't done and it would be very surprising for them to try to dump more money into new storefronts when they are still trying to make their own business model profitable (to their expectations).
It's an AI generated "article", on a site that exclusively feeds headlines into AI to write "articles".
So even if the original headline was - in the now-unknown wording - something rooted in reality, the generative shitcode has now turned both the headline and the content into utter derangement.
In 2022, Blizzard was valued at $60B and had a gross profit of $5.4B. Valve almost certainly had a gross profit more than that (Microsoft estimated $6.5B in 2021). $16B would be such a laughably low figure for the company, especially since Microsoft bought Blizzard at $70B (market cap of $74B around the same time). Not to mention how low-risk Valve's profit is.
On the plus side is HL3 will be released.
On the negative side is everything else about that situation and HL3 will be a rushed shit-show of a cash grab.
LOL valve probably makes 16B in a few quarters
whoever made this up didn't think it through
I’m a little surprised it’s that low. I mean, considering their cloud and hardware divisions they’d be getting, shouldn’t Valve pay a bit more than $16m to buy Microsoft?
They will buy it, then shut it down. Then people will finally buy games at the .... window games store?