Microsoft is reportedly considering buying EA, PUBG Corp and Valve | Hacker News Reader

Microsoft is reportedly considering buying EA, PUBG Corp and Valve

theinquirer.net

15 pointsartsandsci10 comments

EA - Potentially a decent acquisition. A good supply of great exclusives is what the Xbone needs to fight off Sony.

Steam - Can't see a sale going through. Valve makes an absurd amount of money doing relatively little. It's basically Gaben's personal playground. Valve doesn't have the expertise to fix up the windows app store (which is an ecosystem problem). Steam was bootstrapped by HL2, not with exclusive partners. Valve has been doing some great work in VR (knuckles controllers, etc) that could be useful for Microsofts VR offerings, but it seems they basically give that away for free (or subsidised by all the games that use it being sold on steam).

PUBG Corp - Complete waste of time. Player Unknown made a game that is ridiculously fun, but is still buggy and poorly optimised. Unlike Minecraft there isn't an educational/mod play either.

> Steam was bootstrapped by HL2, not with exclusive partners.

A Steam-exclusive title nevertheless though.

go ahead and buy EA, maybe they can fix some of it's problems. but leave valve alone! jeeze. Isn't MS big enough? Valve is a pretty prominent figure in the gaming community and have driven a lot towards gaming on linux. No way that would have happened if Microsoft owned them.

It’d be a shame if they turned Valve into a Windows/Xbox exclusive shop like they did with Bungie back in the day.

Why would Valve sell?

If Microsoft guarantee the culture and let Valve take over the Windows app store it could be excellent.

They'd find some way to ruin it. MS doesn't exactly have a good history with regards to the PC gaming market.

Good question. Isn't Valve the highest revenue-per-employee company in the world? There's no reason to sell a money printing machine. Unless MS is blackmailing them by threatening to lock down third party apps/app stores in Windows, which would rob them of their business model.

I can't imagine the lock-down plan working. I would imagine that people are far more local to Valve than MS. They would be the subject of an immediate AT lawsuit and would receive perhaps the biggest backlash in gamer history.

> I would imagine that people are far more loyal to Valve than MS.

I imagine people would go where the games are. If Valve Linux can only play, say, 80% of games that Windows can, then they'd pick Windows.

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