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Microsoft - keep your filthy hands off Valve, leak shows MSFT would buy Valve
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this post was submitted on 22 Sep 2023
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There’s no chance GabeN sells Steam. It prints money and only looks to increase their profitability over the coming years.
Microsoft can’t buy them anyways at this point I think. The regulatory bodies didn’t like ActiBlizzard, and this would be similar scale, if not larger
I do worry about what might happen when he gets too old/decides to step down though.
If Microsoft did somehow end up buying them I might have to just nope out of gaming altogether. Or just take to the high seas I guess.
I have to imagine he has something planned (inb4 GabeN AI Overlord) for after he’s gone.
He’s a bit crazy about prepping for disaster iirc. He lives in New Zealand now and has since the Covid outbreak. I’d be surprised if there wasn’t a very long document that lays out a lot of rules for if he’s gone and Steam is to continue
Do we get a free copy of the new Gaben AI wiafu?
gAIben
In the immortal words of Cave Johnson:
Holy shit, what if Cave was based on Gabe
Pretty sure he's back living in the US, so he can actually work at the valve offices
At that point I'll probably too old and have lost interest in gaming anyway, so I'll just let the next generation of gamers figure it out themselves. Kinda like boomers leaving us to deal with high property price problem because it's no longer their concern anymore.
Nah it's still their concern too. They're mostly just on the beneficial side of it.
You do know that stores other than Steam exist, right?
And no, I'm not talking about the EGS.
Nothing else comes close to steam in terms of market share.
Isn't that a bad thing?
GOG is missing a good portion of major games. Outside of that most of the options are much worse
Also they seem really averse to Linux for some reason.
Probably the miniscule market share coupled with the increased vocality of its userbase.
Supporting Linux will not bring them a significant uptick in revenue but will increase their customer support load.
EGS is really the only thing remotely close to what Steam does, though.
GOG will always be an afterthought as long as they have their DRM-free policy in place. They're super cool, but they're a niche and will never grow beyond that without losing what makes them cool.
Origin (or whatever EA's calling their store now) gave up pursuing third-party sales years ago. They still do it, but they clearly have no interest in actually making a go of becoming an actual competitor to Steam.
The Windows Store is terrible for a number of different reasons, even if it's better than Microsoft's previous attempts at getting into this space (coughGWFLcough). EGS is more likely to overtake Steam than Windows Store is to even rival EGS.
Uplay (or, again, whatever Ubisoft is calling their store these days) is like Origin - I don't even know for sure if Ubi is doing third-party sales, but if so, it's very much an afterthought for them.
And then everyone else just sells Steam keys. They're not in the same market as the others, so don't really fit into this conversation. If you're 100% reliant on the store you're "competing" with, you're not competing with them.
A lot of games on Steam are DRM-free, but not (yet) on GOG. GOG isn't an afterthought just because of their DRM-free policy, it's also because they're so small.
What else lets me easily play games on Linux, on my couch, without touching a keyboard or mouse?
Yeah but just the amount of games I own on Steam already (not to mention the Steam Deck), if all that ended up getting enshittified by Microsoft it'd be like having to start over from scratch pretty much.
Which is why I buy as many games as I can from stores like GOG, that actually let me keep them no matter what.
Amazon kinda exists?
But they did allow it, unfortunately. And MS could simply argue that it already has dominance in the PC space as 96% of PC gamers are Windows users. So owning Steam is just buying 1 out of many stores (here they tout Epic, Amazon, etc).
I mean it's a bad argument but MS made a lot of bad arguments to get their way and they seemingly worked.
Activision-Blizzard-King isn't a dominant company in any segment. You can't say the same for steam. Regulators would have a much easier time blocking such an acquisition.
Plus, at least from my perspective, Activision-Blizzard was already bad enough that if MS made it worse, it wouldn't affect me because they were already bad enough that I'd swore off their games. MS owning them was an improvement or at worst more of the same.
That's absolutely not the case for Valve. They are one of the few large companies that I respect plus they are playing a big role in breaking the windows stranglehold over OSes when you like to play games.
The level of popular opposition to MS acquiring Valve would be on a whole other level than the opposition to the blizzard acquisition. It might even rival the opposition to Nvidia acquiring ARM.
CoD is dominant fps. It's why they made the concession about it
The regulatory bodies hand waved actiblizzard through. Let's not pretend anything else happened there. Microsoft can do whatever they want and no one is gonna stop them. Same as every other big company.
The only thing stopping Ms. is that valve is a privately owned company. But everyone has a price.
The same regulatory bodies that sued to block the deal without any convincing case "handwaved" it?
Yes, that is just how the American system works. The actual body here is the doj. The ftc tried to sue and was slapped back immediately. This was the ftc trying to show claws and the actual ruling body saying no, you have no power and Microsoft can do what they want.
It was a huge loss for the ftc that has been trying, and failing to fight big tech