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?
according to unverifiable rumours. … The leak comes from an unknown and unreliable source in the gaming industry.
But continues to write an entire article about it. I wouldn’t be shocked if the rumor was set by the person who writes the article itself. Edit: Which itself is only a few paragraphs, but filled with ads, links and images on the entire page.
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.
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.
Microsoft wanted to buy Nintendo and Valve before. It was in the leaked documents. And I’m sure Microsoft makes suggestions all the time, we just don’t hear about it usually. We mostly hear about deals that happen.
Besides that, I can’t imagine that a competitor could buy a competitor. That would be illegal in most cuntries. Unlike Activision, which was not a competitor to Microsoft.
Yeah, I think all indications have been that Microsoft is getting out of the video game business. Or, if they were planning on staying in, why would they close a bunch of studios, including successful ones like Hi-Fi Rush’s Tango games.
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?
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.
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.
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.
I was okay with them getting Blizzard because, well, how much worse could Blizzard actually get with the merger?
But this? I sincerely hope this never happens. Valve isn’t the complete shit-show that Blizzard has been. Valve actually understands its customers and seemingly, mostly, respects them. Please for all things good in this universe, keep it that way.
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