Microsoft - keep your filthy hands off Valve, leak shows MSFT would buy Valve
Well, that's certainly an article title isn't it. But I mean it. Microsoft, don't you dare touch Valve. You're fat enough already and too big as it is.
That leaked email conveniently assumes the owner of Valve would sell it. I can't think of a reason for Gabe to do that.
This is the biggest problem with Valve at the moment. They're awesome, but only because of the current leadership. Once these guys retire or die, it's very likely Valve will enshittify like every other business.
Valve needs to be hit by regulators at some point. They just have too much market power.
Valve is not awesome at all. Ffs, they didn't become a monopoly by accident. People need to stop worshipping this company just because they started packaging wine with their app.
This is the same company that literally started the trend of requiring storefronts and custom installers for their games with HL2... the exact same thing people whine about EA and Blizzard doing.
PC gaming will become a total shit show if Valve dies and they'll be fully responsible for it.
Money? Remember when people thought that about Mojang?
Right? Its like someone leering at you.
Valve was founded in 1996 by former Microsoft employees Gabe Newell and Mike Harrington.
You have no idea how this works.
Gaben already refused to sell to EA and made it abundantly clear that we would rather let valve die than go public.
Microsoft also just recently said they'd buy Nintendo if they could.
All this means is that Microsoft is filthy rich and still doesn't know how to make an original quality game studio. They seem to overly rely on buying out studios and IPs that are successful to rake in more money.
The funny thing about selling valve, what would it even give for Gabe? He's already filthy rich. What more could one want with more money?
Saying no to selling only makes sense in his position, in my opinion. At least I personally would think so. Because then you still keep what is effectively your creation, and can use it to shape the world.
At some point you really do just have enough money.
At some point you really do just have enough money.
Well there is people to whom no amount of money is enough money. Not that it is at that point about, what you can do with that money. Rather by then the amount of money is a leader board and score board all to it's own. The desire to be Forbes number 1 and then to be forbes number 1 with ever increasing lead to the number 2.
However all indications are, Gabe Newell isn't one of those people. He would have had plenty of opportunities to cash out and then do some other business dealings to get ever bigger score card number. Don't really know exactly what else it would tell of him or his character, but the one thing we can pretty confidently tell is "it seems he isn't about just singularly amassing ever growing pile of wealth as large as possible". He would have had plenty opportunity to enrich himself way more aggressively and he didn't.
Yeah where's our antitrust enforcement?
The oligopoly thing has definitely been fucking everything up for decades.
The thought of another company buying Valve, especially one like Microsoft, makes me actually sick. I have spent so much fucking money on my Steam library at this point. If my Steam library gets jacked by some billionaire dickheads it's all over, I'm never paying for anything again.
bad news my friend. Valve is owned by a billionaire dickhead.
This is so stupid. Of course they would buy it. Valve won't sell, but let's do the click baits!
They’d buy Sony and Nintendo if those were up to sell. For the right price (I dunno, in the hundreds of dollars according to my bank account), I’d buy them too.
in the hundreds of dollars according to my bank accoun
You decadent bourgeois pig
Look at Daddy Warbucks over here.
Yeah 100% this. Why would you not buy Valve? The store is a cash cow and the userbase is huge. They have a lot of good faith with the community too. These must be rage bait articles.
They can buy the Steam forums.
As long as Gabe lives, this won't be a problem.
But he's getting on in age so this will eventually be an issue, no doubt...
Gabe will have a good successor. Valve has a lot of talented and passionate employees that have been with the company since near the start.
This nothing email has been making headlines for a week and it's so frustrating. It's literally just a guy from outside the gaming division saying "what if" and Phil saying "sure, that'd be neat"
Gaben is one of the few people in tech I trust to resist the money MSFT would be willing to throw at something as successful as valve. I mean - they’re the closest thing to a trustworthy company as you can find these days.
Yeah, I doubt he cares about the money at this point, and he did leave MSFT, so I'm guessing he isn't interested in selling. He also went out of his way to use Linux to stick it to MSFT.
As long as he runs the company, I don't see it happening.
Eh, I would hardly call Valve trustworthy or the good guy
I would say don't worship multi billion dollar companies.
Especially ones that only give you things you should have always had, like refunds, after being forced to by state lawsuits to force them into compliance with the law.
I miss the days when you actually owned your fucking games and could loan them to friends or sell them to get something else.
They aren't the 'good guy' but they are one of the few tech companies left that try to make money by selling a product people want to buy. Basically everyone else is just trying to screw people over or sell out to investors as soon as they can.
That's not good, but it's the way people understand and think businesses should be run, even though most modern companies no longer work that way.
Valve is not worthy of your trust. Gabe won't sell to MS because Valve is an absolute gold mine and it's extremely unlikely even MS could make him an offer that actually makes more money for him in the long run.
I like to think Gabe knows all too well the importance of remaining a private business. Publicly traded businesses are the root cause of a lot of problems in the world.
I work for a company that has specifically stated it will never do that and has stuck to those guns for 50+ years
I work for one who said the same thing then 2 years ago sold for $12 billion dollars to a public company. The employees didn't get very much of that either.
A public traded company has way more transparency, I have no idea why you believe privately held companies would be in any way better.
The problem is often when the original founder of a private company leaves, the company loses its roots and by that its reason to exist. And those two often go together.
Only more transparency in the fiduciary sense, which only really helps shareholders. All companies are still required to follow any regulatory disclosures, which generally benefits the public and users.
Valve has only gotten to where they are being on the pulse of the gaming community, and being agile to adapt to those needs. Publicly traded companies only care about profits and shareholders by contract. That's kind of their job once they go public. Very few buck that trend.
Gabe has been a large proponent of avoiding the kind of consolidation that Microsoft is doing. He saw the writing on the way years ago when Valve released the Steam consoles. I don't think (and certainly hope) that he wouldn't sell.
I am ruined if this happens. MS would discontinue Proton / Linux and Mac support.
I don't think so. MS is more interested in moving customers to the cloud. So whatever gets more people to use the cloud.
getting rid of linux support may cause people to switch to windows, if not prevent people from switching to begin with...at least that's how executives in ms would think
What? Microsoft added Linux on top of Windows not long ago with the WSL. I severely doubt they'd discontinue proton or Linux and Mac support
Microsoft made WSL to get market share from web devs who were using Linux or Mac, so they could use a Linux shell for their development while using Windows as their main OS. I wouldn’t use WSL as evidence that they wouldn’t gut Proton support in Steam.
That being said, the Steam Deck is a very successful device that I doubt Microsoft would want to get rid of, and Proton is pretty vital for that, so they’d probably keep Proton going because of that. They might still seek to make the next revision of the Steam deck run a Windows based OS though.
Day 1 of suddenly having the urge to keep an offline and DRM free copy of all my steam games.
The article says Microsoft would like to buy Valve. Of course they do. Valve is actively working against Microsoft's interests (and we have to thank them for that).
It does not say Gabe Newell has the slightest intention to sell. Because he doesn't.
Yeah for a while now I'm been buying games on GOG where possible and keeping an archive of them, because I know at some point every company will eventually let you down.
@festus @headmetwall how do you make sure that when you load up a gog game that it does not launch the gog launcher? What are the steps?
Did everyone conveniently forget that Steam DRM is the reason why Steam came to prominence, and why it was ever used by any devs in the first place. Yes it's easily cracked and barely an anti-piracy measure, even admitted by Valve, but it is still DRM.
@XenoStare @headmetwall that’s right. Steam is a business. They are not really for open source. Open source, is still a business model. It’s not public domain or libre software. Then can always make their stuff closed source at anytime. Just need to gather free work from the community and to elevate its private business. Still, there are articles detailing Valve as anti-consumer. It’s a search bar away.
I love Steam (have 2000 or so games on it) but I realize it is only a matter of time before it gets enshittified.
Maybe, but it's still a private company.
Yeah, there is some hope for as long as Valve isn't publicly traded. It's investors that push companies to care only for short term gains.
Valve is not saintly, they have their own sketchy aspects like how they profit over that cosmetics trading market, but releasing the Steam Deck shows they are still thinking of the long term future of PC gaming.
I imagine they would immediately drop proton and move the steam deck too some windows bs
Windows CE is back babyyyyyyyy!
This brings back nightmares from my first job!
no, especially not. After messing/locking down gaming for 2 decades and people having doing the job in porting/reverse engineer their API, etc... they will simply exploit it without any effort.
MSFT is evil, it does not "love" opensource (which is only TS and .NET), it just came with their massive war treasure and eat the effort of people while having been the MAIN responsible of slowing down innovation!
They pretend they love FOSS. "Look, we own GitHub, the biggest FOSS code sharing platform!". Of course, because you bought it you morons.
For the love of God, please Valve never sell out. I love the current state of things and every day I dread someone might get a bad idea and fuck it all up for the rest of us to enrich himself.
I am not sure if there are any failsafes in the BoD at Valve, but I am sure as long as Gabe is at the helm, we are all safe.
It's impossible for me to understand not having enough. M$ is like some megacorp villain that wants to swallow everything
Always has been.
Thugs4less LOL
@Krzak @boo There used to be much more diversity in the marketplace, but those are bygone days.
Power, influence and greed are the prime movers these days and whowever is in a position to monopolize on this will have a caravan of equally minded people who will agree to participate in the slaughter of the free marketplace just for a piece of the action.
When one company in an industry has nearly endless cash, as Microsoft and Apple do, it is natural that everyone else would be seen as acquisition targets
The difference is Valve is completely privately owned, Microsoft cannot force a sale.
With a publicly traded business, the business must be run in the interests of the shareholders, ie it must pursue profits above all else. Thus a buyer can effectively present "an offer you can't refuse", at least the business can't refuse on behalf of shareholders (maybe the shareholders could vote and refuse). With a private business the owner generally has free reign to run the business as they see fit, they could run it into the ground if they so desired.
So it doesn't matter how much cash Microsoft or whoever have, so long as Gabe doesn't want to sell.
Embrace, Extend, Extinguish moment
Triple E gaming
This would be a nightmare
It's a private company that isn't for sale. There was another leak a week ago where they were trying to acquire Nintendo which IS publicly traded, but I think the private shares still control 51%, but that's old info.
Hopefully Gabe doesn't allow that to ever happen
I would buy Valve as well, but that doesn't change the fact they are not for sale.
I've tried switching to Linux and didn't succeed. Nevertheless i wouldn't wanna see a Microsoft Deck with Windows 11.
Tons of Windows based gaming handhelds already exist from Asus, Lenovo, Aya, GPD, etc. I'd doubt Microsoft releasing one, hypothetical Valve acquisition or not, would set the world on fire.
Knowing good old M$, though, if they tried it they'd make it some kind of Xbox product.
And it'd be adorably digital-only
Yeah, but SteamOS is definitely a better OS. A lighter OS specifically. The Steam Deck, while being powerful, isn't exactly too powerful and having Windows on it isn't optimal.
Luckily GPD (i think) offers SteamOS for their devices and i do want to buy a Win Mini.
Maybe you just haven't found the right distro that made you feel at home. If you're still willing to try, experiment with a bunch of different distros, then use the one you like the most for an extended period of time (weeks instead of days) to build familiarity. Resist the urge to boot windows during that period and try to do everything on Linux.
I did try Void initially. Void Linux doesn't have much resources but they did have an IRC chat willing to help... albeit with a little dont ask to ask schtick. I actually installed Void on a few of my devices for a while to try and get my favorite games to run.
Aaaanyway i encountered some weirdness like being able to install a game one time and then not anymore after installing Void on the internal SSD. I didn't get my favorite Sims games to work and tried various Proton configurations... It was sad. My ex gf told me to buy a graphics card for my GPD Win 2, which has an Intel HD 600. I could but first i'd have to somehow make this thing compatible to Thunderbolt. Intel HD graphics aren't exactly good but "buy a graphics card" sucks as an answer too, even if in jest.
I do still want to switch to Linux later once my mental health is better. And perhaps once i got the new Win Mini with integrated AMD graphics. I think GPD actually offers SteamOS for their devices so that's a distro i may want to give a shot. I do love the SteamOS interface and the KDE desktop.
Try, try again.
Xbox fans will say this is good.
But they would be wrong. More monopoly is never good.
I'm an Xbox fan but I'm first a Linux fan and PC gaming fan. This is bad. Valve needs to stay private.
DONE with valve if this were to happen.
I'd rather not game at all than put up with that shit.
If it happens, the call of the seas will be irresistable.
Anyone else foresee a "Microsoft VS Disney Power Games" style thing coming soon? Since MS is practically buying game companies like no tomorrow....
Fist Nintendo and now Valve. They really dream big. But even if they would be up for purchase, I don't think it would be allowed after how long it took for Blizzard to be bought.
Guess WE should buy it. Ensure 51% of the shares are locked up tight. It is a private company, so Valve would have to be cool with it. Otherwise, the wrong person getting a divorce, dividing assets in half, and it is all over.
Is xBox not enough?
What if you got Half Life 3?
They'd probably contract Bethesda to develop it and make another soulless open world grindfest on an engine that's about as overdue for retirement as Mitch McConnell
MSFT is full of misfits.
Would be the right move. Hopefully happens after the Vavle class action.
Valve class action?
Vavle has a class action for breaking antitrust laws and unfair competition laws in the PC market.
Steam was wholly responsible for the 50 to 60 dollar price hike in PC gaming.