Google Valve buyout nothing but a whole lot of Steam
By Erna Mahyuni
Another buyout by Google was rumoured to be on the cards. The conquest – a successful game company Half-Lifers know and love as Valve, has now been dismissed as nothing but rumours.
The Inquirer broke the story leading to quite the frenzy of speculation. Why Valve? Well, why not Valve? Instead of going the annoying DRM-DVD route, Valve instead put together one heck of a content distribution system – Steam. Google’s certainly not going to buy Valve for Half-Life or any of the company’s successful titles but Steam’s success might likely be the backbone for Google’s own digital content distribution system.
Valve’s Doug Lombardi has been pretty straightforward about the news. He called them hearsay and nothing more but "complete fabrication". Kotaku got the rundown and this fun quote: "I never heard anything about it until I woke up this morning and checked my Blackberry, which John McCain invented," joked Lombardi. "There’s really nothing else to say."
If Google is on another buying spree, and it isn’t Valve it’s aiming for, what (or who) else could Google want? No news on that front but is Valve up for sale anytime soon? Lombardi has said before that the company is open to buy offers but the only company up for that deal would be game company-swallowing EA. The Blizzard-Vivendi deal is likely to keep both parties too busy to add another partner to their fray, especially with what looks like the MMO occasion to beat in the upcoming WOW:Wrath of the Lich King.
So it looks like Google won’t likely be attempting to diversify itself too much. Not after spending good money on Korean blogging platform TNC. It will likely pay a good dividend and strengthen Google’s foothold in Internet-mad South Korea but will the platform also have some part in a future revamp of Google’s Blogger? Now that would be some story.
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Entry was posted
on Thursday, September 18th, 2008 at 9:41 am
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Read more entries by Erna Mahyuni.
Stumble It!
November 25th, 2008
That is good news. There have been nothing but problems with Valve’s Steam service.
Major conflicts exist between Steam and the end-user’s computer. These problems include but are not limited to: random internet drops, incompatible with many firewalls including the very common/stable ZoneAlarm. Steam is also incompatible with a wide array of virus scanners and widely available software applications.
Many people have complained about incompetent Valve – Steam support staff. Suggestions from support generally involve uninstalling incompatible software. This support feedback, if you even receive support, can take months to receive.
It is a manufacturer’s duty/obligation to ensure its software is compatible with commonly used applications. Yet, Valve – Steam employees seem to neglect to take responsibility into their own hands, instead choosing to blame the end-user for having incompatible software.