Valve would sue the hell out of MS if they tried. And you can bet it would trigger anti-trust lawsuits. Not to mention how pissed off damn near every single publisher in the game industry would be and how many of them would also join in on a lawsuit pile on. MS would completely kill their entire gaming division if they tried that.
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Another day, Another Rumor of Valve being Acquired
- Thread starter Zarathustra[H]
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Valve would sue the hell out of MS if they tried. And you can bet it would trigger anti-trust lawsuits. Not to mention how pissed off damn near every single publisher in the game industry would be and how many of them would also join in on a lawsuit pile on. MS would completely kill their entire gaming division if they tried that.
KazeoHin
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Well, Microsoft could spin it as Valve not authoring their storefront securely.
"After all, It's not Microsoft's responsibility to make sure some 3rd party application ALWAYS runs even if it's not secure or built well! After all, Microsoft offers a plethora of documentation and developmental assistance online! It's already going above and beyond to help developers make applications for its platform! It's not their fault Valve isn't building their 'Steam' application in a way that's safe and secure. Microsoft is doing everything it's required to do to help Valve create a mature tool for the Windows platform"
The trick is that nothing is provable beyond reasonable doubt. If there is even a modicum of reasonable doubt, AKA no concrete, written/date-stamped evidence of Microsoft's developers implementing INTENTIONAL code to do this, it can't be proven legally.
Let me say first I don't agree with this method and I think it's scummy, anti-consumer, unfair and outright evil. Which is exactly why I think any corporation worth 1,000,000,000,000+ dollars would consider it (you don't get to that level by being consumer-friendly and generous). If Microsoft REALLY wanted Valve, they could easily work some way to devalue it enough to make it a cheap buy, while still having the opportunity to build it up after purchase, and do it in a legally bulletproof way. After all: Microsoft makes WAY less money from Valve's users than Valve makes from Microsoft's users. If Microsoft lost all Steam users, it would represent a minority percentage of their overall userbase, they'd still have the MASSIVE sales of corporate work machines, grandma's outlook-to-screen adaptors, school notebooks, professional workstations etc. etc. and that's JUST Windows. they still have Azure, Microsoft 365, Entra, Server, Xbox If Valve lost Microsoft's users, it would be the VAST VAST majority of their userbase.
Microsoft loses an arm, Valve loses their head.
I'm just mind-vomiting but I mean, look at the world we live in. It's like the Cyberpunk robocop dystopia the '80s warned us about. I wouldn't put it past 'em.
That said, Isn't valve an entirely private company? It's not publicly traded so it's 'Value' is really up to however much it's current owners are willing to sell it for.
Beyond a reasonable doubt only applies to criminal cases. Civil cases have a much lower bar.
Mad Maxx
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I’d support any acquisition of Valve if the legal documents mandated that Half-Life 3 must be the first project following the M&A.
KazeoHin
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But would you REALLY want Half Life 3 being made by the same people who made Redfall, Halo Infinite, Starfield... etc?
Microsoft hasn't published a good game in a decade. Even Forza has fallen off the rails, and that one was gold.
KazeoHin
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Yeah, but you can also just drag on ANY court case with appeals, did you know the Intel Vs AMD case from 2007 is STILL GOING in some territories?
So Microsoft can just drag them on.
Mad Maxx
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Yup, roll the dice and see what develops. I'm in.
Problem is Intel didn’t break any laws, they were being shitty, but there aren’t any laws against saying “If you order 100,000 of these we’ll sell them to you at a 20% discount”. The catch is Intel knew they would only need some 90,000 units at most.
So by selling them at that discount with extras it just means there is little incentive for the OEM to buy anything from anybody else because then they will have a large quantity of extra inventory taking up space with no place to sell them. Instead of a small quantity of them to use in some budget lineup the following year.
But despite the claims its not like Intel ever said “You can’t buy those we wont allow it”, they just set their price brackets in such a way that any OEM that were double dipping couldn’t hit the order numbers to qualify for discounts.
At worst Intel was abusing their Monopoly position, and being anti competitive, but Intel was being very careful to simply be in foul of the spirit of the laws while not breaking the letter of those laws.
It’s why the $1.2B was eventually turned down to something like $400M instead.
In all fairness, Microsoft has fired all those developers… So clean slate?
SeymourGore
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Might be interesting to see what sort of gonzo story Obsidian could create in Half-life's world.
These aren't the days of "DOS isn't done until Lotus won't run" and Gaben's already got a long history of being annoyed with Microsoft, and I bet he'd use his bully pulpit to let people know that sudden "problems" like this may have something to do with Microsoft.
Microsoft, have been acquisition genius, but for something like Steam they would be walking on such fragile eggs among all relevant regulator that they would need to play it extremely clean for a good amount of time.
This sounds a 2 way a terrible strategy:
- Make it certain for the acquisition to never pass
- Remove windows status of being the PC gaming OS, which is quite valuable, Steam is one of the most beloved application of all time.
Normies have a library of games they bought, many would learn the simple 2 click you need to do to still launch .exe seen as dangerous because they have skins in the game or throw quite the fit if they do not easily find how...
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Here’s the thing about this theory… some people, gamers especially, might just leave for another OS. Also, win 11 has terrible uptake— do you think MS wants to slow it any further? I would just go use Wine and I think any 12 year old who wants to game badly would use YouTube on their phone to walk them through it. MS’s vice grip on PC gaming only exists due to direct X; if direct X becomes non exclusive I would uninstall and move to a different OS immediately.
And I don't even blame the troll that created this acquisition fanfiction - he's gotta be laughing his ass off to his discord buddies.
The real story here is how down bad some of the tech sites clearly are, to be propagating this nonsense when ten seconds is all it takes to see the "source" is a kid with a backwards baseball hat that opens CS:GO lootcrates for 6-7 viewers on Twitch.
But nobody was deceived here. KitGuru's editorial gymnastics of first trying to qualify their 'source' as some known quantity, but then slapping a "unconfirmed / we question this information" disclaimer at the end of the page, tells us they knew better, but are so thirsty that they don't care.
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OutOfPhase
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Tons of existing money? Check.
Money coming in monthly just fine? Check.
No corpo-pressure? Check.
Why would they sell?
Money coming in monthly just fine? Check.
No corpo-pressure? Check.
Why would they sell?
Airbrushkid
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Way back there was talk about Gabe's son not wanting anything to do with any of it.
Armenius
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Mike Harrington still owns a good chunk of the company, and I think Gabe's ex-wife Lisa got a piece of it in the divorce.
Airbrushkid
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I did come across another site stated that this article is hashed up old news. They say the site that posted it was just reposting an old article.
DukenukemX
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This theory has been passed around but do you think Microsoft gave up on buying Valve? Like I've said, Valve is the biggest thorn in Microsoft's dominance in the PC market. Xbox is dead because of Steam. Windows 11 is becoming a meme where people constantly mention it's time to switch to Linux. Who exactly is behind Linux's success? It's all Valve. Microsoft's tactic for the past two decades is to buy up their competition and then integrate it into their ecosystem. Once the market is sufficiently dominated, they then massively defund the product and is left in maintenance mode. You can see this with Minecraft where slowly you went from logging into your Mojang account to now requiring a Microsoft account. Eventually you'll see the Java edition be depreciated as well. You can see this with OpenAI as Microsoft tried really hard to absorb them, and in some way they have succeeded. I wouldn't be shocked that Microsoft is still trying to see what it would take to own Valve. Remember that at one point Vivendi did own Valve, which was a publicly traded company. The reason Valve isn't publicly traded was because at some point they got severally burned in the process. Valve has done it before, and they may yet do it again. Gabe Newell could easily have his great great great grand children retire with $16 Billion Dollars. One reason not to take the offer is because he has a love for the PC gaming industry. Gabe Newell is such a secluded man that nobody really knows much of what his thoughts are on selling Valve. He is also a brilliant business man who might be trying to see how high Microsoft is willing to go. This is a man who saw the direction the industry was going, even when a man like Bill Gates didn't.
I think this might be the one instance where they're not going to do that. Killing Java Minecraft would drive every last modded player away.
DouglasteR
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Also, from the little i´ve gathered, Gabe´s son isn´t exactly a copy of his father. Many of his statements were.... conflicting with a pure PC gamer enthusiast.
Steam is a sucessful product, love by many, hated by those who, are hated by those who love it.
Money isn´t the issue. A man in Gaben position, age and estature should know better that acting on greed. He is a beacon of rightfulness, he´s trying to set a ground, a level in consumer service (Steam is, by far, the best store in the Internet).
But ofc he is also a human. Let´s see what ends first.
Praise Gaben.
The biggest thorn in Microsoft's side is Microsoft.
If they wanted Windows 11 to be adopted, maybe they should have made it good. If they want people to use the Windows Store to buy stuff, it needs to work consistently, or at least be something normal people can repair or reinstall. If they've got all their telemetry everywhere and can't figure this out, what is the telemetry good for?
PS maybe don't tell people that windows 10 is the last Windows ever and then come out with windows 11 that probably could have just been another build of windows 10.
There must be some typo-qualification missing here.
Valve has probably been one of the really good thing for Microsoft dominance in the PC market... not sure they are a bigger nuisance than Apple-redhat-Canonical-amazon-google, etc... when a school-goverment-entreprise leave in part or fully of their Microsoft product stack I do not imagine it is often because of Valve versus some of those, think how much annually the type of gamer going to Linux was sending money to Microsoft.... for a lot of them I assume it was near $0 a year in average.
Has for who exactly behind linux success, Steam userbase is less than 2% on Linux, while Linux has what more than 70% of the much bigger smartphone userbase, giant share of the supercomputer-datacentera-ai computers... would not surprise me if today more people will launch Linux from their windows session than to play a steam game.
https://lwn.net/Articles/915435/
Biggest contributor of Linux Kernel:
| By changesets | ||
|---|---|---|
| Huawei Technologies | 1281 | 9.2% |
| Intel | 1254 | 9.0% |
| (Unknown) | 1097 | 7.9% |
917 | 6.6% | |
| Linaro | 837 | 6.0% |
| AMD | 750 | 5.4% |
| Red Hat | 672 | 4.8% |
| (None) | 564 | 4.0% |
| Meta | 414 | 3.0% |
| NVIDIA | 389 | 2.8% |
| SUSE | 333 | 2.4% |
| Oracle | 318 | 2.3% |
| NXP Semiconductors | 275 | 2.0% |
| IBM | 260 | 1.9% |
| Renesas Electronics | 224 | 1.6% |
| (Consultant) | 208 | 1.5% |
| Microchip Technology Inc. | 192 | 1.4% |
| Arm | 187 | 1.3% |
| MediaTek | 164 | 1.2% |
| Collabora | 144 | 1.0% |
Breaking basic taskbar functionality did not go well, imagine doing it on an windows update...
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DukenukemX
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Recently, Mojang has added addons to BedRock edition. You get them from buying them off the store of course. This means the free and open nature of Java Edition is now working against their best interests. At some point, Java Edition will be dropped.
If you have no plans to ever install Linux then you will go Windows 11. Yes, Microsoft is it's own worst enemy, but they know it's either Windows or Mac, and they know you won't go Mac. Linux though is a real serious problem for Microsoft, since you can actually play more games on it than Mac, and it works on any machine.
It's not like Microsoft was worried about Windows dominance. Steam may have cemented it, but it also means nobody buys games from the Windows App Store. It also means people jumped off Xbox when Microsoft thought it was cool to require always online and pushing every Xbox owner to also get the Kinect. Same reason why people don't trust Microsoft with Recall, because even in 2013 they didn't trust Microsoft with Kinect which is always watching you and recording you.
As someone who's been using Linux for a very long time, I can tell you that Valve contributed the most important things to Linux. Mesa drivers for example sucked before Valve got involved. It was Valve who made the Vulkan driver for Intel, because Intel had no intention of making one at the time. This also helped create RADV for AMD, because at the time AMD had no immediate intention to make an open source driver for Linux. Valve also created ACO for AMD to help further improve performance. They're big contributors to Vulkan. Valve is the reason why Wine sucks less today, as they hired people to work with Codeweavers to substantially improve Wine. The Linux kernel itself hasn't received a lot from Valve, but GNU/Linux is so much more beyond the kernel.
"Griffais says the company is also directly paying more than 100 open-source developers to work on the Proton compatibility layer, the Mesa graphics driver, and Vulkan, among other tasks like Steam for Linux and Chromebooks."
Years ago even Linus Torvalds said that Valve will save the Linux desktop. I think he's right to say this. If we lose Valve to Microsoft then Linux goes to shit very fast.
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What does any of this have to do with Steam ? If you mean by jumped off Xbox to go to the Windows PC that not that big of a lost and in good part because of steam success.
Do you really think the most important thing to Linux would be remotely linked to gaming ? There is many billions of Linux device in the world, almost none in % are used to play pc game.
Maybe important for the very small subset of Linux that his the Linux Desktop (like I said there missing a word, you probably mean the gaming Linux desktop and not Linux in that original statement, right ?), the idea that valve did more for Linux worldwide adoption than Google did with Android (and a long list of other company like Huawei , how many millions of device they sell running Linux every year, maybe the biggest contributor to the code in recent years, for Linux to power the cloud for example) seem quite debatable.
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Bedrock addons don't offer nearly the functionality of Java mods, last time I checked, which was admittedly a while ago. Basically they're just json files to change stuff like loot tables, the shape of items, stuff like that. I'll have to go reinstall the Windows edition to check but I suspect there's nothing out there that would support stuff like Tinker's Construct, Botania, or Create, which make huge changes to the game.
DukenukemX
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Xbox died years ago, and that's mainly due to Steam. Even Game Passes decline is mainly due to Steam.
View: https://youtu.be/M1MdqlD6FCk?si=PG9QEBSZHJPW95-_
Keep in mind that Valve only monitors Linux users playing games on Steam. I play constantly on my Linux machine and it's been a year since I played a game off Steam. Mostly because I'm addicted to World of Warcraft and Minecraft. Also, back when Windows 95 was first released, what do you think was the most installed piece of software at the time? I give you a hint, it wasn't Windows 95.
View: https://youtu.be/Td_PGkfIdIQ?t=354
No I mean GNU/Linux. Gaming may not be a primary factor for Linux adoption, but it's certainly a big factor. It's not infrequent to find someone asking if their favorite game will work on Linux. It's obviously a concern and if said game doesn't work then it's likely the person would avoid installing Linux. It's the same reason why after 20 years of MacOS, that the best Apple can do is muster a measly 15%.
We're not talking about Linux the kernel. We're talking about GNU/Linux. If we started to include ChromeOS and Android then this topic would go nowhere. Like it or not, Valve made Linux usable for most people.
A ok yes that was the typo missing. (exactly like i said), you were not talking about Linux but some smaller subset... even then it is so popular in the workplace... not so sure about that.
Android made it usable to billions, valve made it for a couple of millions, NAS device made it available to a giant amount has well.
Also, back when Windows 95 was first released, what do you think was the most installed piece of software at the time? I give you a hint, it wasn't Windows 95.
Well obviously it can't be win 95, it was new and required a relatively powerful computer, would it have been the most populars versions of MS-DOS ?
DukenukemX
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At Microsoft they saw that Doom was installed in more machines than Windows 95. This is dismissed by Microsoft, but Gabe Newell saw this as a business opportunity. Remember that WinDoom was ported by Gabe Newell himself, because he saw something that most of Microsoft dismissed. He then left Microsoft to start his own company, which is now Valve today. Meanwhile, Bill Gates went to Sony to discuss the idea of putting Windows on their Playstation console, which Sony promptly told him to screw off. Microsoft realized the mistake they made and started to double down on gaming for Windows with the creation of DirectX. When Microsoft decided to make the Xbox, it was Windows gaming that took a back seat for Microsoft. Meanwhile Valve created Steam in 2003 because they were sick and tired of publishers. Just so happened that many other studios were also sick of publishers and asked to put their games on Steam. Microsoft's first introduction to an App like Store was in 2012 with Windows 8, which was almost a decade later after Steam. Microsoft like many companies have dismissed gaming as a major factor in personal computers, to the point where even Bill Gates himself would step into Doom and preach about Windows.
View: https://youtu.be/b2V9TFrmQ_Q?si=fxwjURsNpk8tsJYJ
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When Windows 95 launched, was it special ? Win 95 could just run on recent powerful PC and just launched.
This is dismissed, but Gates himself make an ads about it and Direct X was started significantly before the launch of Windows 95 because of the game running better on Dos than windows (or at all), there was a Windows 3.1 early version. The we get the kids to use our system, so once they grow up school have the reflex to use them and then jobs as well where it matter has always been part of their strategy.
I would say they were the one for which it was the least the case, locked down gaming via DirectX. Now Windows is a 3 trillion company while a success story gaming device an industry leader do terrible business (the money going into the Fornite people hands instead of the OS-device maker):
https://www.cnbc.com/2024/02/19/son...-after-ps5-sales-cut-sparks-stock-plunge.html
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infojunkie
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Gabe is what..60? He might be interested selling in 10 years.
Armenius
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Your timeline is off. DirectX was in development and released long before Bill Gates talked to Sony. Doom 95 ran on the first version of DirectX when it came out in 1996. The first runtime for DirectX was released a year earlier, and development for the API was started in 1994 with development versions running on both Windows 3.1 and 95 before the first PlayStation console was even released. Your video is talking about having a Windows-type OS running on the PlayStation 2, not the original PlayStation.
Someone asked GOG what their policy was and...
https://www.bluesnews.com/s/272434/gog-com-will-do-our-best-to-honor-library-bequests
https://www.bluesnews.com/s/272434/gog-com-will-do-our-best-to-honor-library-bequests
The government already made a stink about ATVI, there's zero chance they let this one go through.