I’m a PC gamer and have been since I was a kid. It’s literally my number one thing I do when I have free time is get on some games and hang with the boys. It’s a big part of my life.
As game companies go, I don’t trust Microsoft, EA, Ubisoft, Blizzard, Bethesda, Sony, Epic Games… It’s a long list. Valve is the only company I even kinda trust (Which isn’t even that much these days). If Microsoft bought Valve I’d probably never buy a PC game again. Because all the companies selling them would be companies I don’t wanna give money.
But it’s not true that they were buying it so it’s a moot point. Just wanted to rant. :)
GabeN has pretty much all the moneys and doesn’t seem to be the kind of guy who needs a dick shaped rocket to feel like his daddy loves him. The only way Valve is going anywhere is after he kicks it.
Without digging too far, seems hit net worth is around $6 billion. Obviously that’s nothing compared to say Bezos but if he wanted to ride a dick-shaped rocket into space I’m sure he could arrange it. He does, however, own the sub that holds the records for deepest crewed dives in all 5 oceans: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DSV_Limiting_Factor
As you said though, he seems to be pretty much chill and until the day he passes away I think Valve is safe. And that will be a sad day…
Wonder if it’s piloted using a steamdeck or controller?
And he does invest heavily into Brain Computer Interface https://starfishneuroscience.com/team/
He doesn’t want a dick-shaped rocket, he’s more into yachts, apparently. I understand he owns several large ones.
He did send a gnome into space on a rocket although it was for charity.
Preach on man… I feel the same way. If microshit bought Valve, I’d never buy another thing on the platform. And you could effectively forget Linux gaming as well.
well, it’s not like existing contributions would disappear even if that happened; such is the beauty of open source
If Microsoft bought Valve I’d probably never buy a PC game again. Because all the companies selling them would be companies I don’t wanna give money.
What about itch?
And GoG
GOG is a subsidiary of CD Projekt (which I personally don’t trust after the disastrous release of Cyberpunk 2077, and the empty promises of bringing GOG Galaxy to Linux; they also stretch the definition of DRM-free in some cases).
Well, steam isn’t even remotely DRM free. Valve is also far from flawless (allowing TF2 to be ran by hackers for literal years) and run by a multi billionaire. But sure, cyberpunk was unoptimized.
Ok? I didn’t claim anything about Steam
Uhh this thread is about alternatives to Steam, so…
I was trying to say GOG isn’t comparable to Itch…
Edit: Btw I buy games from all 3, if I didn’t do business with every company I don’t trust I’d probably starve by now
if microsoft bought valve, i would radicalize pretty badly. Not much else to do after ones only real hobby goes up in flames.
I’m sorry…ppl thought this was real? They paid like 60 something billion for blizz. VALVE is EASILY worth that, if not double.
Also Gabe hates Microsoft, and Valve is a private company so he doesn’t have to sell.
I fear the day that man dies. I hope I have lost interest in gaming at that point.
I’m assuming there will be a willy wonka style competition to determine his heir any day now
A reality show I would watch.
That’s exactly what Half Life 3 will be.
He and Linus both will leave behind interesting vacuums.
Not Linus. He has a lot of people he trusts
I’m guessing Gabe Newell does too. I highly doubt he hasn’t considered succession at this point, and I’m guessing people he trusts are already largely running everything anyway.
“Interesting.”
Yes. Likely and unfortunately correct.
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Obviously this is fake, but if it was spinning off steam from the game developer, then maybe?
$12b seems far too low by that comparison. 30% of all games sales would be an outrageous annual figure.
If steam is included, 12b is a joke, if just valves game rights, meaning HL and CS, then the price is not THAT stupid (still quite).
Maybe this would be the way go get HL3, it would ofc be horrible cashgrab, but HL3 would be out.
Edit: bit details, in 2021 Valve had $10b revenue from steam, and $3b revenue from other sources (heh, source, get it)
Steam has to be worth a lot more than 12 billion.
Considering what they paid for bethesda and co (7.5 bil) they should at least pay 100 bil.
They (estimations by random pages) already made a billion in revenue from cs cases in 2023.
No way they are <70 bil for the cash cow Steam is in comparison to ABK.Steam basically IS PC gaming, and probably has more active users than Xbox or Playstation, maybe even combined. There’s no way it’s worth any less than Activison Blizzard
I will be happily surprised if you prove me wrong but a quick Google search suggested all three have around 120 million active users monthly
Jesus christ what a nightmare suggestion. That would be the death of the last good site on the internet. The enshittification they would inflict upon us as they fire all the senior staff, “legally” and onesidedly change all the contracts you’ve signed without your consultation, prune content, discontinue support for features and gear (byebye linux users), and increase their cut of dev’s pie - it’d be truly legendary. Legenshitty, that’s how bad it would be.
Thousands would board the ships again. The stability of steam is a huge reason why I often buy games
That would likely also destroy the entire indie dev economy. I highly doubt Microsoft would price things in such a way that continues making it viable for small or single person development teams to make profit.
I’m sure the biggest reason they want to buy it is so they can try to put a stop to gaming on Linux. The prospect of putting windows-only anticheat in the steam client and steam runtime probably has Microsoft executives foaming at the mouth.
At this point I wanna fucking die
Meh, the world is hell, but the games are cool and you can always just steal shit from the people who obviously don’t deserve your money. Really, everyone ought to be doing that on principle, to help bring them down, but try explaining actual morality to the church crowd lol
“Valve would rather disintegrate than sell out” I think that was their answer to rumours of an EA acquisition of Valve, and it seems to stay true to this day
Bandcamp used to be like that, ultimately it is a fundamentally empty promise, someday sooner than you think it will happen to valve. Enjoy it while it lasts but lets keep a keen eye on the future.
It’ll probably happen when GabeN dies or retires.
Hopefully long down the road, it’s just especially after Bandcamp it’s fresh in my mind that this is never a guarantee.
He did lose a lot of weight recently. Technically it could be to stay healthy and live longer, or due to an illness.
Tim Schafer on why he sold out: “What if I had… a lot of money”.
Where’s Double Fine now?
The rag called metro making news from random stuff again, I see. This is not even news. It’s literally “reporting” that something is not happening.
Like this: “Intel not buying AMD for 6B$” Industry insiders report that Intel has decided not to buy their rivals for 6B$. The CEO of AMD has reportedly stated having no interest in selling to Intel. Their spokesperson, when confronted with this breaking news, replied “WTF have you been smoking, Pringles?” We will continue to report on this story as it continues to develop.
They are just covering what a rando on Xitter is saying. Sadly this is the news cycle nowadays:
Unverified / unknown person posts a claim on X > “news” websites write a 6 paragraph article about this single post
And instead of being critical, people just gobble up anything as if it was true.
Metro is owned by the Daily Mail Group, which is why they’re so shit. It’s an output for news-esque shitposting.
There was some brief hullabaloo where some nobody on Xitter claimed M$ was considering the buying Valve for 12B$. No sources, no credibility, but some news sources started talking about it like it was news.
Kellogg’s Cereal is not buying Raytheon Aerospace.
-equivalent headline
I’d believe in a Raytheon Kellogg’s merger before I believed GabeN would sell to M$
SpaceX will not be selling itself to Boeing, surprising absolutely nobody
Nah I’d believe that. That’s exactly the sort of four dimensional genius business move that Musk is known for.
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Did GOG sell out particularly horribly?
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But to be fair, that’s kinda hard for those old games and it still runs with wine.
That being said, valve is an ally of the Linux community. There are almost no companies that can be trusted, but valve is one of them.
Privately held. That means there’s a chance that someone can go good with it.
And that’s why Steam gets my money instead of GOG.
That said, apparently Heroic has some kind of agreement with GOG where they get paid for sales, so maybe by buying games on Linux through Heroic you’ll get GOG interested in Linux support.
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Sure, but it’s at least an avenue to a decent launcher for GOG games on Linux. I still prefer Steam, but Heroic is good enough that I’ll consider buying a few games now and then.
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It’s not an overly sustainable service at the scale it is running.
I hearby announce that I am also not buying Valve & Counter-Strike for £12 billion. You heard it here first!
Thanks for the info. I totally assumed you were a rich billionaire mogul.
valve is a fucking money printer
honestly would be funny if valve bought microsoft instead
(edit: typo and clarification)
We’d get to watch Microsoft somehow destroy it, which would be as amazing as it would be awful. They really know how to make a great product terrible.
Though, who am I kidding, they’d just close the entire thing down and expect people to switch to their store. That’s all capitalism’s “competition” is good for these days.
i for one would find it absolutely hilarious if valve just closed microsoft as a “redundant” or “vestigial”
big ole uno reverse card
Let’s hope for a future where SteamOS ushers in the Year of the Linux Desktop and SteamOS replaced Windows everywhere.
hot damn… dare i to hope? dare i to DREAM? you know what, if anyone could get linux to be supported everywhere, it’d probably be valve.
Take a look at bazzite. It is built upon the idea of a steamOS PC, and comes very close. It is also quite beginner friendly and idiot proof due to its architecture and the ability to roll back to a working version at any time, in case you brick something on accident.
thank you for the suggestion! i tried linux mint years and years ago on a spare computer but i didn’t really get ‘into’ it enough to feel like i could be used to it… but it would be super cool if the passage of time and new developments may have produced an even more approachable experience
As a recent convert from windows myself (about two weeks in) I can only recommend it. Almost everything including windows games worked right out of the box with minimal tinkering required, and setting up and configuring the system itself was even simpler than on Windows. It feels a lot like setting up a new smartphone as a comparison.
Personally i just copied my important files and documents to a backup drive, prepared the install medium and then nuked my windows installation, but you may want to take a less drastic approach and create a test partition first to dip your toes in.
If you try it (which I very much recommend!), don’t be afraid to ask for help and further try not to be discouraged if the wrong type of person (eg “read the manual noob” type people) respond. The Linux community is full of both the most helpful and most elitist type of people, and an unfortunate amount of new users get scared away by the second group.
Ah, I misread(the y in “they” is missing and I got thrown off haha)
Dude that would be funny as hell and Microsoft fucking deserves it. They don’t make a single quality product; all they seem to be able to do is reskin a ‘90s Windows OS as a worse product for ten thousandth time and close competitors so they don’t need to do any real work.
Microsoft sits on an incredible amount of cash. I’ve read that they could do nothing for a ridiculous time period like 50 or 100 years and still not go bankrupt.
Considering what an awful job they do with everything they touch maybe we should just can the whole company and give that back to the people of the world who’ve needed to suffer under their bullshit for far too long.
They can keep some money for Excel, I guess.
Nah, open-source that shizz
As lucrative as Valve and Steam may seem to buy, even for 10x that amount, any analyst who is realistic about suggesting the purchase to another company would know that it isn’t worth it. Not that it’s a bad buy, but whoever can afford to buy it likely could not help themselves but fuck it up and run the whole operation to the ground.
I agree with you and that works in a sane economy. Thank fucking Christ that Elon isn’t a big gamer…
Elon was able to buy Twitter because it’s public, and it wasn’t making money.
Valve is a privately owned company, and I have a feeling they care a little about what they’re doing.
You can tell from his Elden Ring build.
Lol yea, I forgot what timeline we’re living in
Next in the news “water is wet”.
I feel like Steam would make more than 12 billion pounds in the time it would take for a take over to finalize
So no Win11-only compatibility and copilot bloatware in Steam? What a sad day 🙁
12bil for steam? Nah man, its probably triple than that.
Activision, which is like Valve’s slower and far less intelligent cousin, sold for $59B. Valve would be worth orders of magnitude more than that.
It was 69B
Yeah, I now realize the article was talking £ not $
Nice
