In news that is both unsurprising and absolutely horrifying, is turns out that EA has been very interested in acquiring Valve over the years, and would very likely have paid as much as $1 billion to do so.
This information comes out of a New York Times article on Valve that was published last Saturday.
“Valve has been pursued over the years by Electronic Arts, which would very likely have valued Valve at well over $1 billion had the talks progressed that far, said two people with knowledge of the discussion who spoke on condition of anonymity because the talks were private.”
Thankfully, the talks seem to have broken down long ago. Even if EA had been determined to make the acquisition, that estimated offer was likely far lower than Valve’s actual worth, as the article later points out. Wedbush Securities analyst Michael Pachter estimates Valve’s value to be around $2.5 billion. Of course Pachter sort of has a long history of being wrong about things, so even that number could be inaccurate.
The Pach Attack is comin’ at ya!
Ignoring the fact that EA doesn’t exactly have the money lying around to make Valve-sized acquisitions anymore, it’s unlikely that any pricetag would be high enough to convince them to join up with Riccitiello’s Sith Empire. As a privately-owned company, they answer to nobody but themselves, and CEO Gabe Newell, who seems to be completely against letting Valve be acquired, saying that he would rather allow the company to “disintegrate” and scatter its employees across the industry than allow another major publisher to take control.
“It’s way more likely we would head in that direction than say, ‘Let’s find some giant company that wants to cash us out and wait two or three years to have our employment agreements terminate,’ he said.
To close this out, an amusing anecdote about a desk:
“A few years ago, a Valve hire who had worked in special effects in Hollywood balked at wheeling his desk. The news reached Mr. Newell, who promptly picked up the desk himself and carried it to the new location, to the new employee’s embarrassment.
The man, whom Valve declined to name, is no longer with the company.”
If this had happened, we’d be looking at Half-Life 13 with Day 1 DLC.
i want to see it happen just to laugh at all the angry fanboys and neckbeards
lel that’ll show the losers that enjoy things
What? You don’t enjoy Half-Life or Team Fortress? You think Gaben really is as bad as EA? Explain, please, how turning something that’s not shit into something worse than shit could make anyone ever happy?
EA is the place where games go to die. I wouldn’t wish that fate to anyone, not even actiblizzard, and I hate those guys.
I have a hard time believing that Valve is worth 1 billion dollars, I’m definitively sure that they are worth a lot but nowhere near that amount. They don’t seem to have presented a behavior that is similar to a billion dollar company, you would even say that they seem to avoid it as much as possible.
If they were a true billion dollar force, they would definitely hire a lot more people for the Steam service for approval of the games submitted, instead they pass it down to the community to sort it out by themselves. It’s much more cost effective, but leaving such important things to the community will eventually lead to many problems, even after the 100$ fee for submission privileges. The major one that I have is that even if people clicks the big green button to get it on steam, the same people who approved of the game, would not purchase it when it releases with a price tag attached to it…
-The Theory
They still pick the games that go up, they just let the community show which games people are interested in, instead of having like 10 people decide which games are good enough for Steam. Plus it’s a huge waste of time to hire people to do that, they would rather hire people to work on video games or Steam itself.
Valve is definitely worth a billion or two, mainly because of their Steam store.
Between the cut Valve takes from every game sold on Steam, the several million copies every game they’ve ever made sells and the TF2/DotA2 cash shops, they are most definitely worth at least a billion or two by now.
I agree that Greenlight is ultimately going to need some kind of moderation team, but probably not a big one thanks to the $100 donation. That’s going to keep like 90% of potential submissions out.
In terms of assets, I’ll concede that the overall value of Valve must be around the first digits of billions, the Steam service alone must be worth 800-950 million if it were to be sold. But they don’t seem to behave like a billionaire company, so I assume that in terms of yearly revenue, they surely make at least 200 million on average right now, maybe more 300 million max.
It’s still a lot of money for a Private company, I commend them for that achievement.
When I say they don’t behave like a billionaire company, I mean in terms of spending. My last comment only gave one example, but companies who have massive amounts of money use that money to invest it in it’s most profitable asset(for Valve it would be steam, at this point) fro the sole purpose of making it better and having a return on profit.
Valve just needs to spend 50’000$ to 250’000$ on moderators and the approval process. It would definitely have a great return on profit, since approved games would have a better chance to be of better quality and in return has a better chance of selling to more people.
Maybe they are spending all of that money on working on their games,but they’ve showed almost nothing out of it. The last big thing they have done is getting prepared onto entering the gaming hardware market, as to what is the hardware they plan to sell is of absolutely speculative nature. I’m just saying they could do so much more with the monetary freedom they enjoy…
-The Theory
Considering Valve is more profitable per employee than the likes of Google and Apple, I’d say Mr Fatso knows what he is doing. Valve has a lot of secret projects we don’t even know about until they are very mature.
Don’t add a signature like that. It looks really dumb. If I want to know who you are, I can look at your selected name at the top of your post.
I think that first picture is an amazingly accurate picture of Frank Gibeau, EA’s president.
And it’s good to hear that mr. Newell is not stupid enough to go to the “darkside” of gaming industry. After all, that would ruin Valve’s good name in gaming.