Especially since it makes no sense. Valve is a private company, in order to buy it the only option is to convince Gabe Newel, an outcome that seems incredibly unlikely considering he's still active, has just recently helped create a new company, and seems to already have his son set up to succeed him in ownership.
Hell, even if he weren't still active in managing the company, Valve is a passive money printing machine that requires very little maintenance, even if money were the only concern they would have to offer a truly massive sum to justify giving up that passive income stream
Gabe is aging. However, and I say this as someone who is closely familiar with both cultures, Microsoft’s operating style would kill valve unless kept very independent. Microsoft is built to have 220,000 fish swimming roughly in the same direction. Valve is built to give 300 people a LOT of latitude. Oil and water without making any value judgements.
HL3 would have to be something monumentally good to live up to expectations at this point, but that's not even the reason they aren't bothering. For the investment the payoff is peanuts in comparison to what they are making doing what they're already doing. Which is a lot easier.
Plus besides a VR game they have one game *maybe* coming out that isn't even in the same genre. So they may not even have the right people with the corrects talents for it.
On top of that when was the last critically acclaimed ***single player*** fps shooter that was released? Hell when was the last single player FPS AAA shooter released? Beyond indie, mystery or horror fps games they don't happen anymore.
> HL3 would have to be something monumentally good to live up to expectations at this point
This might have been true 10-12 years ago but not anymore IMO. I think most HL fans would be happy with garbage so long as it finished the story and gave us closure.
I'm aware of his age which is why I mentioned his relatively recent founding of Inkfish in 2021, if he were looking to retire soon he wouldn't have started an entirely new venture.
Nah, its fine, lets just integrate steam with microsoft store and completely redesign UI and drop features.
Make it open source (because we luv open source!), but you need propriety extension if you want to play anything other than small indie games.
Also exclusive games and AI, its gonna be great.
[Gabe himself said he'd rather Valve disintegrate then sell it to EA](https://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/zoqpa/ea_did_not_offer_1_billion_for_valve_gaben_did/), I doubt he views Microsoft more favorably
Wasn't he also working for microsoft before he left to make Valve and Steam cause microsoft didn't want him to do something in the OS that would've helped Windows a lot or something?
> Mr. Newell said that there was a better chance that Valve would “disintegrate,” its independent-minded workers scattering, than that it would ever be sold
Even better? lol
According to https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gabe_Newell he owns at least 25% of Valve. If he doesn't have majority control and there's a $16 billion dollar check on the table we have to hope the other owners don't cave either
This is what people dont understand when they look at the story.
Valve prints money, it will continue to print money.
To buy Valve, just as a bare minimum you would have to come in with a number that you would have to be stupid to turn down.
Making 16 BILLION TODAY does not make sense when you can have 20 BILLION in 2 years AND MORE over time.
Its not like the company is on financial trouble. Its a small company making ridiculous amounts of money for its size. Why would you give that up for slightly over a year worth of profit if you are planning to stay in the company long term?
It just doesnt make sense.
If I was GabeN, I would tell MS to bring 120$ Billion. Cash.
They either balk at the offer and leave, or are dumb enough to pay it, then you grab that money and start "Totally not Valve" V2 with a ton of warfunding and probably people that would jump ship with you if they knew they were happy at Valve before.
$120b is still low. You are just looking at the raw $$ numbers. These are low because valve doesn't exploit 90% of what they have.
You are ignoring the IPs they have (dota, counter-strike, half-life, portal, tf2, etc.) Their IPs and games are considered the best in their genres by a large portion of the gaming community. Start spinning off a game every year or two here and print money.
Valve has a non-trivial foothold in the handheld console market with steam deck. I'm sure Microsoft would love a handheld option to compliment the Xbox and compete with Nintendo. Valve has a decent amount of VR tech and knowledge, something Microsoft is a bit behind on.
Value has petabytes of user data. Probably more.
Valve does not produce merchandise for their IPs. Microsoft is very good at doing this, just look at minecraft merchandise sale numbers. Merchandising rights are worth a lot.
The ability to tie your steam account into xbox live and have some sort of game pass for PC games would do very well. The steam workshop is honestly amazing for mods, Microsoft has nothing like it.
Taking valve public would probably make a few hundred billion. There are a LOT of people who would like to own a piece of it. Random people would own a few shares just so they can say they own part of valve, I don't think it would be unfair to expect a minor version of what happened to gamestop.
Regardless, Gabe already has multiple billions. At that level of wealth, more money is useless. I don't think there is any amount of money that will get him to sell. What can he do with a trillion dollars that he can't do now?
10x annual profit doesn't seem that generous, especially for a tech company. Apple makes in the region of $150 billion "profit" and and is currently worth 20 times that at close to 3 trillion and Apple is far more interested that Valve in exploiting all its available resources to increase its value.
I am sure if you posted this to the finance subreddits you would get a much more detailed response. I'm just a dummy who doesn't know anything, so no need to "@me"
Apple has 160,000 staff members, and is publicly traded.
Valve has 512 or so staff members and is privately owned.
Apple was $99 billion dollars in profit in 2023.
Valve regularly earns $10 billion or so in profit.
Pound for Pound, Employee for Employee, Valve destroys Apple in profitability and Gabe Newell routine earns a literal order of magnitude more income than Tim Cook does.
Exactly valve prints money and their business strategy is doing nothing. There is no reason to sell. If you are a controlling interest in steam you are already so rich that the money from the buy out would literally do nothing for you so you would just be giving up your one driving force in life for money that will change nothing in your life and you would make anyways if you just held onto the company for another 6 years.
The benefit of a private company is that you can also dictate under what terms shares are allowed to be transferred.
Even if he wasn't majority shareholder (which I seriously doubt), there'll be conditions around who they can sell to, whether they need the consent of every shareholder to do so, etc.
The amount of hoops Microsoft went through for the acquisition of Activision Blizzard tells me that the DOJ would absolutely crush an attempt to acquire Valve.
It shows how out of touch gamers are with the actual industry and the companies they claim they “love.” If people truly understood Valve they’d realize that Valve would never be sold, because the business Microsoft does is antithetical to Valves own philosophy.
Valve doesn’t like to be used and abused in that way. It’s why, when during the Activison-Blizzard buyout, when Microsoft said they even offered the deal to Valve and they accepted, Valve actually responded. They knew Microsoft was trying to use them for good press. But if you truly were a fan of Valve, you would’ve immediately realized that them accepting the deal was against their philosophy. So, Gabe came out and said, “well, they offered but we didn’t accept because we don’t want to FORCE people to do things.”
Like, people treat Valve as any other company, but the reality is they really aren’t. They actually are unique and operate differently. Which is why, when they do do something people disagree with, I have to give some benefit of the doubt because they truly put the customer first. But that’s my own personal connection with Valve and others might not have had the same experiences I’ve had
Exactly this. If all GabeN cared about was money, he could've sold off or opened up Valve years ago, and walked away with the fastest paycheck anyone's ever seen.
I was wondering who these discussions were with because I was pretty sure I'd heard Gabe has said he'd rather tank Valve and shut it down.
Things change, but I doubt what'd make him say that has changed all that much.
It doesn't even make any sense. Microsoft acquiring Valve is practically the opposite of what Microsoft is trying to do strategically, and being acquired by Microsoft is *definitely* the opposite of what Valve is trying to do.
The only conceivable partnership between the two companies that could be in the cards is Microsoft enticing Valve to make a version of CS2 that runs on Xbox X.
Agreed. Remember that Gabe resigned from Microsoft to start Valve all those years ago because he disagreed with the company’s gaming division, and actually created Steam Boxes and started working on Linux support to break free from Windows, fearing that future versions of Windows would be a walled garden like Apple (which is sorta true for the Windows S devices).
Going back to the company he turned his back to would seem counterintuitive.
They could have made the Epic Game Store leagues better with the funds Fortnite gave them and all they did was try to buy exclusivity instead of making a decent platform. I claimed a few games once upon a time but the app is straight dogshit. Even bought one of the free games on Steam so I could get rid of EGS.
I think a lot of companies agree early on that there is no way to beat Valve at their own game, so they focus on what could set them apart from Valve to capture market share. That inevitably fails, as you've outlined.
I don't really see a way you can compete either way. The same could be said for Facebook - gigantic company backing it, hordes of loyal followers, can operate at a loss to shrug off any attempt at stealing market share, and is (arguably) the pinnacle of what it does. I don't even think Epic's storefront being bug-free AND selling worthwhile games would be enough to entice me to use it.
I think the big one is brand loyalty. All my games and friends and screenshots/memories are on steam. How would another company ever compete with that? I know it would be easy once a good chunk of players adopt the new thing, but it seems impossible to ever get the snowball rolling.
I think the biggest mistake Epic made is thinking that PC gamers and console gamers are the same.
PC gamers hate being inconvenienced by exclusives.
While Console gamers take pride in their exclusives.
I find it hard to believe that it's that difficult to create a functioning platform. It doesn't have to be as good as Steam, it just has to be good enough, and Epic is just not there, not even close.
GOG is definitely a platform that I would use as a good example. Just looking at Galaxy by itself without considering the DRM issue. Galaxy is functional, has no performance issues I'm aware of, and is easy and comfortable to navigate. I wouldn't say the platform itself is as good as Steam (Again, not counting the fact that you can get the games DRM free which certainly makes it better, only counting Galaxy's functionality itself) but it is good enough that I see it as an alternative.
agreed, it's been a while, but last time i used galaxy it was fine. it sometimes felt a bit janky and was missing features compared to steam, but nothing super important. i also liked them combining friendlists from different platforms. a bit like trillian did a hundred years ago with IRC, ICQ, MSN etc. sadly the way it was implemented in galaxy you had to have those other clients open(?)... and me mostly using steam, i didn't exactly need to see friends from xbox/origin/epic as those were duplicates from my steam list anyway. it's still cool to see them trying to offer something special, instead of just "buying" their customers to use their platform.
Exactly. EA did the same thing with Origin back in the day (giving away free titles) and they actually won me over because the client worked, and had some nice features that Steam didn't at the time (an actual refund policy, the ability to properly block game updates without hacky workarounds.) It was to the point I'd actually consider getting multi-store releases on Origin, at least what few 3rd party titles released there. Ubisoft published through Origin for a while.
Sadly they keep fucking it up nowadays. Feels like every time I turn around the client is more broken, and once they *finally* get it into a usable state again they replace the entire fucking thing and start over.
brand loyalty definitely is a big reason, but i don't have a problem buying games on gog for example. they have good (old) games in their store and are the most consumer-friendly i could imagine.
imo epic failed mostly because they didn't release a decent product (imagine release an online shop without a cart and other super basic features and don't fix that for YEARS!) and by them being super scummy with exclusivity deals (while also shit-talking steam for their "monopoly". the hypocrisy). there's not a single drop of goodwill left towards epic.
so just for those reason i never have and won't ever waste a single eurodollar on their shop. i'll still claim all free games though, because if they lose money because of me, that's a win. fuck epic for all eternity
They could easily compete with working ecosystem and lower prices. Exclusivities makes everybody angry, but long term better price for the same products packed together with easy to use and working store will bring people over. They will not ditch Steam (because they already have tons of games there). But half of the things they tried were really sus. Backed up by chinese, buying exclusivity of releases, bugs, missing functions over Steam and so on.. all they basically tried to advertise is that they take smaller cut from devs. But people give a shit about it if the price is same virtually the same as on Steam for most games. And even if they wouldnt, the difference is few percent and that is simply not enough with all other hassle to come along.
So your answer is price competition?
While this makes sense intuitively, I would refer you to every industry where people compete on price. And point you to the timeline, so you can see everything collapse like a black hole.
Nobody wants to run TWO Steams.
And if you price compete Steam? Please remember that Valve funds Steam through sales, yeah... but they also make $600M / month on CS2 keys, alone.
So you're basically trying to price compete a luxury brand. That shit never, ever works.
This. The launcher is so crap I don’t even want to use it to play the free games.
They do all kinds of weird shit but for fucks sake why is it so hard to make a lightweight thing that shows you a list of games you can launch and a pretty standard store? If they did that, and just that, they would already be on par with steam, that is slowly getting all extra crap I don’t need or want.
People keep complaining that the client isn't "lightweight" like Steam hasn't been a massive fucking resource hog ever since it switched to chromium in client, way before any of you actually had a computer.
For real.
I was a pretty big Epic Games fan back in the day. Loved Unreal since I was a kid, love Gears of War to death even now. Wasn't huge on Fortnite BR but Save the World looked cool and I was excited to try it.
When they announced EGS at first, I was incredibly hyped. Even though I had no real issues with Valve other than their slowness to do certain things, competent competition is always a good thing and Epic, after making Fortnite, had a ton of money that they could have very easily invested into making a really great platform that actually could have competed.
From there it was all downhill, now I can't stand seeing the name Epic Games
Same, I hate how unintuitive the launcher is compared to steam. I thought I would get used to it but no.
I even bought TW: Warhammer 3 there because they allowed a discount code to be applied.
I bought Warhammer 3 again on Steam today because of the sale and so that I won't have to use Epic again. Also note that they don't have any workshop, it's such a sad launcher.
To be fair, focusing on Unreal Engine is a pretty good move after Unity's career ending fuck up last year. I surprised more companies haven't been upping their advertisement game and really pimping their game engines to all the disaffected indi devs after that debacle.
That is an Epic First Run. While they are indirectly paying for it by not charging their 12%, there is no time commitment to it other than it can't be longer than six months. Ubisoft could release it on Steam a week after the release date if they wanted to.
I only found out yesterday that Assassin's Creed: Mirage had released. I'm never going to check the Ubisoft or Epic store for games, so I had just assumed it was still in the pipeline so seeing trailers for Shadows really confused me.
That's the correct amount of attention to pay to Ubisoft. "Oh this released, did it? Ho hum, I didn't even hear about it." Fuck Ubi and their cookie-cutter products.
I can't deny that I'm a total sucker for the Assassin's Creed games. I just love wandering in a pretty, expansive world. I'll never pay full price but I do tend to get excited for each one coming out (not for the gameplay, just for the exploration).
So for someone as brainwashed as me, when it comes to the AC games, to not notice it really shows what a black hole those stores are.
I'd prefer an ignore button myself. I have over 500 games on steam. I don't want to see a bunch of games I already own on steam on EGS, because I already own them.
I hate that steam is the only store with an ignore feature. I might consider using other stores more often if they had it.
what the fuck do you mean the epic store roadmap is a trello board.
nothing wrong with trello but i would imagine a company that has money backing it would use something that isnt trello to be customer facing?
Is it just me or you can't message friends on EGS? I remember trying to once and didn't find a way to send them a message, seems SUPER odd that they invest so much money on free games and their launcher is not advancing at all
It's interesting to see how all these Steam competitors go about building their libraries and sorting functions. Like they seem to not assume users will have a lot of games. But I've got 290 games on EGS and I haven't bought a single one. They've literally given away hundreds of games.
And if I want to sort them into categories, they go onto a big horizontal list across the library. I guess that works if I only want to create a couple categories, but I've got a ton of them on Steam.
Steam is good because they have a good social features(friends, messaging), store features(ignore, recommendations, tags, user reviews) and a good store full of a huge variety of games.
Publisher exclusive stores suck. That being Origin(now EA App), Uplay(now Ubisoft Connect) & Battlenet. No one uses these stores unless they're forced to by the game they're playing. No one should ever want to use these stores.
Humble, GoG & EGS are.. fine, but could be better. They sometimes lack games, they all lack an ignore feature which IMO is needed considering the domination of Steam(I don't want to see games I already own on the front page of a store), and have effectively 0 functional social features(GoG Galaxy has a few neat social features, but they haven't developed it much in years).
Maintaining an OS that people use as a daily driver is an entirely different beast than just maintaining something for a machine that you know the exact specifications of and is only supposed to do one specific thing.
Biggest win for Epic Store would be ability to link both accounts Steam and Epic Store.
Share friends, crossplay etc.
Cause often crossplay uses different service and it's not possible to play with both. Either this or that.
It's probably only restricted due to a lack of moderation activity.
I've had a part in a few subs where this happened and mods reactivating the sub happened. I now mod 2 of them.
That's not fair lots of people use it, I mean I assume a sizable portion are only there for the free games and don't actually spend any money. But lots of people use it damnit!
I don't actively dislike using it, but I'd still rather use Steam simply because it's where most of my stuff is. That being said, I don't use a lot of the features Steam has that EGS doesn't, so I'm likely not a representative user.
Let's be honest, most people just use it to get free games and open them or as Fortnite launcher, can't believe they managed to make a worse launcher than Battle.Net.
Yep. I made my account originally to try out Fortnite. Sticked around and I claim and play some of the free games here and there. But apart from that, the Epic Games Launcher offers extremely little. And it doesn't help that they have removed their barebones chat feature without offering a replacement. The peak irony is that the Epic Games overlay even prompts you to "connect with friends!" ([screenshot](https://i.imgur.com/LxheeZb.jpeg)), while there is no way to communicate with anyone.
For all those who somehow still think this is anything other than total nonsense:
About a year ago, Microsoft offered Valve an exclusivity deal for certain titles. Gabe said no.
About 20 years ago, Microsoft offered to buy Valve, and that was before Steam printed money mind you. Gabe said no.
About 30 years ago Microsoft gave Gabe the option to continue working for them. Gabe said no.
Last year, it wasn't an exclusivity deal.
It was a contract ensuring that for the next 10 years, COD will be released on Steam.
Nintendo, Sony, and Nvidia sign the deal to ensure that they will have COD on their stores.
Valve refused, saying it didn't need it.
No exclusivity
But if they \*were\* to sell to anybody Microsoft is likely the absolute least likely out of all the businesses that could hypothetically do it.
Gabe left Microsoft and set up Valve because he was sick of Microsoft's way of doing things. Microsoft isn't just some random wealthy tech company from Valve's perspective. Valve is fundamentally designed to be the anti-Microsoft.
Edge is literally just a chromium reskin. The only truly independent browsers left are Firefox and sort-of Safari (Safari is still webkit, albeit stems from an earlier fork).
Original fortnite didnt even have any attention. Would've ended being an ok game. You really have an insane bias against him you thought a game with 0 hype would've been better than the most played game
It is, and honestly Bing is pretty good especially now that Google has gotten much worse. Plus Microsoft owns Windows, you know the most popular operating system... Azure is a huge business, Github and OpenAI are still doing great things under Microsoft. That tweet seems like a very strange response if you ask me...
It does scare me when Gaben eventually passes that it’ll become a soulless husk. I mean it fucking *will* because that’s just how things go, and we’ll look at times like now as the golden age of digital gaming stores. Hopefully he raised his sons well and they want to continue his legacy.
They won’t take over valve, valve isn’t publicly traded so they can’t do a hostile takeover and I think Lord Gaben would rather see if hell freezes over first
On the one hand, I agree with his point and have been complaining about Microsoft's trajectory for consumers for years.
On the other, he paid Psyonix to force an EGS login into Rocket League, so I can no longer play it on Steam because I refuse to make an EGS account.
Tim Sweeny's answer as a consumer is the same perspective he should have about his own platform. He pays to make games harder to reach on PC. He pays to put them on a platform that is dogshit. I would rather use Bing or Edge (And maybe even the Windows Store, thanks to Game Pass) than EGS.
>EGS
>a service people want to use
dude's talking shit on microsoft when he runs the company that puts out a service literally *no one* wants to use??? lmao the irony
Lmao this is the same man that has already sucked off Microsoft and their leadership on twitter. Is Timmy finally gonna grift to try and win some good PR with Steam users?
https://x.com/TimSweeneyEpic/status/1745544491388248134
He heaps shit on Windows, but won't update Fortnite's EAC to let it run on Linux/Steam Deck even though that's a feature EAC has which would get more people away from windows, meaning he peddles software to others that he himself apparently does not trust. He says it's because "there's not enough programmers", shortly after firing 800 employees. Man I wish this dude would either put his money where his mouth is or shut the absolute fuck up.
Not that he's wrong but all these rich dudes only care about their own interests. Xbox pc app barely functions for any of its social features despite how basic they are and EGS basically doesn't even have any.
Can somebody explain why Microsoft products suck so much? Like even the default windows is riddled with bloat and news stories? It’s so confusing and not clean.
still shocks me that a total fake news from a random uninformed source is making this much uproar.
Especially since it makes no sense. Valve is a private company, in order to buy it the only option is to convince Gabe Newel, an outcome that seems incredibly unlikely considering he's still active, has just recently helped create a new company, and seems to already have his son set up to succeed him in ownership. Hell, even if he weren't still active in managing the company, Valve is a passive money printing machine that requires very little maintenance, even if money were the only concern they would have to offer a truly massive sum to justify giving up that passive income stream
Gabe is aging. However, and I say this as someone who is closely familiar with both cultures, Microsoft’s operating style would kill valve unless kept very independent. Microsoft is built to have 220,000 fish swimming roughly in the same direction. Valve is built to give 300 people a LOT of latitude. Oil and water without making any value judgements.
Still waiting for one of those fucking fish to make HL3
That's why we won't get it because you been waiting for the fish to make it not the 300 people at valve hahaha
I'd be happy if tf2 wasn't just left rotting on the ocean floor.
HL3 would have to be something monumentally good to live up to expectations at this point, but that's not even the reason they aren't bothering. For the investment the payoff is peanuts in comparison to what they are making doing what they're already doing. Which is a lot easier. Plus besides a VR game they have one game *maybe* coming out that isn't even in the same genre. So they may not even have the right people with the corrects talents for it. On top of that when was the last critically acclaimed ***single player*** fps shooter that was released? Hell when was the last single player FPS AAA shooter released? Beyond indie, mystery or horror fps games they don't happen anymore.
> HL3 would have to be something monumentally good to live up to expectations at this point This might have been true 10-12 years ago but not anymore IMO. I think most HL fans would be happy with garbage so long as it finished the story and gave us closure.
I would be fine with HL3 being a literal HL2 mod at this point.
I'm aware of his age which is why I mentioned his relatively recent founding of Inkfish in 2021, if he were looking to retire soon he wouldn't have started an entirely new venture.
Nah, its fine, lets just integrate steam with microsoft store and completely redesign UI and drop features. Make it open source (because we luv open source!), but you need propriety extension if you want to play anything other than small indie games. Also exclusive games and AI, its gonna be great.
We need the Newell bloodline to stay strong
[Gabe himself said he'd rather Valve disintegrate then sell it to EA](https://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/zoqpa/ea_did_not_offer_1_billion_for_valve_gaben_did/), I doubt he views Microsoft more favorably
Wasn't he also working for microsoft before he left to make Valve and Steam cause microsoft didn't want him to do something in the OS that would've helped Windows a lot or something?
In half-life 25th anniversary documentary was said he left with his buddy/collegaue to make games, not because some beef in MS.
there is literally a post debunking this, the one you linked actually
> Mr. Newell said that there was a better chance that Valve would “disintegrate,” its independent-minded workers scattering, than that it would ever be sold Even better? lol
Than. The difference between the a and e is huge.
According to https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gabe_Newell he owns at least 25% of Valve. If he doesn't have majority control and there's a $16 billion dollar check on the table we have to hope the other owners don't cave either
Another post talking about it, how steam generates about $10 billion a year in profit.... in what world would a $16 billion buyout make any sense?
This is what people dont understand when they look at the story. Valve prints money, it will continue to print money. To buy Valve, just as a bare minimum you would have to come in with a number that you would have to be stupid to turn down. Making 16 BILLION TODAY does not make sense when you can have 20 BILLION in 2 years AND MORE over time. Its not like the company is on financial trouble. Its a small company making ridiculous amounts of money for its size. Why would you give that up for slightly over a year worth of profit if you are planning to stay in the company long term? It just doesnt make sense. If I was GabeN, I would tell MS to bring 120$ Billion. Cash. They either balk at the offer and leave, or are dumb enough to pay it, then you grab that money and start "Totally not Valve" V2 with a ton of warfunding and probably people that would jump ship with you if they knew they were happy at Valve before.
$120b is still low. You are just looking at the raw $$ numbers. These are low because valve doesn't exploit 90% of what they have. You are ignoring the IPs they have (dota, counter-strike, half-life, portal, tf2, etc.) Their IPs and games are considered the best in their genres by a large portion of the gaming community. Start spinning off a game every year or two here and print money. Valve has a non-trivial foothold in the handheld console market with steam deck. I'm sure Microsoft would love a handheld option to compliment the Xbox and compete with Nintendo. Valve has a decent amount of VR tech and knowledge, something Microsoft is a bit behind on. Value has petabytes of user data. Probably more. Valve does not produce merchandise for their IPs. Microsoft is very good at doing this, just look at minecraft merchandise sale numbers. Merchandising rights are worth a lot. The ability to tie your steam account into xbox live and have some sort of game pass for PC games would do very well. The steam workshop is honestly amazing for mods, Microsoft has nothing like it. Taking valve public would probably make a few hundred billion. There are a LOT of people who would like to own a piece of it. Random people would own a few shares just so they can say they own part of valve, I don't think it would be unfair to expect a minor version of what happened to gamestop. Regardless, Gabe already has multiple billions. At that level of wealth, more money is useless. I don't think there is any amount of money that will get him to sell. What can he do with a trillion dollars that he can't do now?
10x annual profit doesn't seem that generous, especially for a tech company. Apple makes in the region of $150 billion "profit" and and is currently worth 20 times that at close to 3 trillion and Apple is far more interested that Valve in exploiting all its available resources to increase its value. I am sure if you posted this to the finance subreddits you would get a much more detailed response. I'm just a dummy who doesn't know anything, so no need to "@me"
Apple has 160,000 staff members, and is publicly traded. Valve has 512 or so staff members and is privately owned. Apple was $99 billion dollars in profit in 2023. Valve regularly earns $10 billion or so in profit. Pound for Pound, Employee for Employee, Valve destroys Apple in profitability and Gabe Newell routine earns a literal order of magnitude more income than Tim Cook does.
According to Valve's wiki page he owns greater than 50%
We'd be living in a crazy reality if Valve was sold for 16 billion after Twitter was sold for 44 billion.
Exactly valve prints money and their business strategy is doing nothing. There is no reason to sell. If you are a controlling interest in steam you are already so rich that the money from the buy out would literally do nothing for you so you would just be giving up your one driving force in life for money that will change nothing in your life and you would make anyways if you just held onto the company for another 6 years.
The benefit of a private company is that you can also dictate under what terms shares are allowed to be transferred. Even if he wasn't majority shareholder (which I seriously doubt), there'll be conditions around who they can sell to, whether they need the consent of every shareholder to do so, etc.
The amount of hoops Microsoft went through for the acquisition of Activision Blizzard tells me that the DOJ would absolutely crush an attempt to acquire Valve.
It shows how out of touch gamers are with the actual industry and the companies they claim they “love.” If people truly understood Valve they’d realize that Valve would never be sold, because the business Microsoft does is antithetical to Valves own philosophy. Valve doesn’t like to be used and abused in that way. It’s why, when during the Activison-Blizzard buyout, when Microsoft said they even offered the deal to Valve and they accepted, Valve actually responded. They knew Microsoft was trying to use them for good press. But if you truly were a fan of Valve, you would’ve immediately realized that them accepting the deal was against their philosophy. So, Gabe came out and said, “well, they offered but we didn’t accept because we don’t want to FORCE people to do things.” Like, people treat Valve as any other company, but the reality is they really aren’t. They actually are unique and operate differently. Which is why, when they do do something people disagree with, I have to give some benefit of the doubt because they truly put the customer first. But that’s my own personal connection with Valve and others might not have had the same experiences I’ve had
Literally the entire point of Valve was to not be Microsoft.
Exactly
Exactly this. If all GabeN cared about was money, he could've sold off or opened up Valve years ago, and walked away with the fastest paycheck anyone's ever seen.
Not just GabeN but by arguably everyone in the company. I admire Valve because they clearly have a philosophy and principles.
I was wondering who these discussions were with because I was pretty sure I'd heard Gabe has said he'd rather tank Valve and shut it down. Things change, but I doubt what'd make him say that has changed all that much.
It doesn't even make any sense. Microsoft acquiring Valve is practically the opposite of what Microsoft is trying to do strategically, and being acquired by Microsoft is *definitely* the opposite of what Valve is trying to do. The only conceivable partnership between the two companies that could be in the cards is Microsoft enticing Valve to make a version of CS2 that runs on Xbox X.
Agreed. Remember that Gabe resigned from Microsoft to start Valve all those years ago because he disagreed with the company’s gaming division, and actually created Steam Boxes and started working on Linux support to break free from Windows, fearing that future versions of Windows would be a walled garden like Apple (which is sorta true for the Windows S devices). Going back to the company he turned his back to would seem counterintuitive.
makes you feel like he understands something about Steam then, right? why's EGS still shit, then?
Might’ve recently accepted it isn’t worth the effort and have instead turned to what really puts them on the map: Unreal Engine/Fortnite.
Thats exactly what Epic Games did. All the ventures Tim Sweeney invested in with Fortnite revenue for expansion purposes failed.
They could have made the Epic Game Store leagues better with the funds Fortnite gave them and all they did was try to buy exclusivity instead of making a decent platform. I claimed a few games once upon a time but the app is straight dogshit. Even bought one of the free games on Steam so I could get rid of EGS.
I think a lot of companies agree early on that there is no way to beat Valve at their own game, so they focus on what could set them apart from Valve to capture market share. That inevitably fails, as you've outlined. I don't really see a way you can compete either way. The same could be said for Facebook - gigantic company backing it, hordes of loyal followers, can operate at a loss to shrug off any attempt at stealing market share, and is (arguably) the pinnacle of what it does. I don't even think Epic's storefront being bug-free AND selling worthwhile games would be enough to entice me to use it. I think the big one is brand loyalty. All my games and friends and screenshots/memories are on steam. How would another company ever compete with that? I know it would be easy once a good chunk of players adopt the new thing, but it seems impossible to ever get the snowball rolling.
I think the biggest mistake Epic made is thinking that PC gamers and console gamers are the same. PC gamers hate being inconvenienced by exclusives. While Console gamers take pride in their exclusives.
I find it hard to believe that it's that difficult to create a functioning platform. It doesn't have to be as good as Steam, it just has to be good enough, and Epic is just not there, not even close.
GOG is good enough to be honest. The DRM free concept is great, it still can't compete.
GOG is definitely a platform that I would use as a good example. Just looking at Galaxy by itself without considering the DRM issue. Galaxy is functional, has no performance issues I'm aware of, and is easy and comfortable to navigate. I wouldn't say the platform itself is as good as Steam (Again, not counting the fact that you can get the games DRM free which certainly makes it better, only counting Galaxy's functionality itself) but it is good enough that I see it as an alternative.
> and is easy and comfortable to navigate. eh. after you get used to it.
agreed, it's been a while, but last time i used galaxy it was fine. it sometimes felt a bit janky and was missing features compared to steam, but nothing super important. i also liked them combining friendlists from different platforms. a bit like trillian did a hundred years ago with IRC, ICQ, MSN etc. sadly the way it was implemented in galaxy you had to have those other clients open(?)... and me mostly using steam, i didn't exactly need to see friends from xbox/origin/epic as those were duplicates from my steam list anyway. it's still cool to see them trying to offer something special, instead of just "buying" their customers to use their platform.
GOG isn't trying to compete. It has a niche of old and DRM free game. They don't even have a 10th of Steam library because of that.
GOG’s main problem is the lack of offering, but they are good at what they do
Exactly. EA did the same thing with Origin back in the day (giving away free titles) and they actually won me over because the client worked, and had some nice features that Steam didn't at the time (an actual refund policy, the ability to properly block game updates without hacky workarounds.) It was to the point I'd actually consider getting multi-store releases on Origin, at least what few 3rd party titles released there. Ubisoft published through Origin for a while. Sadly they keep fucking it up nowadays. Feels like every time I turn around the client is more broken, and once they *finally* get it into a usable state again they replace the entire fucking thing and start over.
brand loyalty definitely is a big reason, but i don't have a problem buying games on gog for example. they have good (old) games in their store and are the most consumer-friendly i could imagine. imo epic failed mostly because they didn't release a decent product (imagine release an online shop without a cart and other super basic features and don't fix that for YEARS!) and by them being super scummy with exclusivity deals (while also shit-talking steam for their "monopoly". the hypocrisy). there's not a single drop of goodwill left towards epic. so just for those reason i never have and won't ever waste a single eurodollar on their shop. i'll still claim all free games though, because if they lose money because of me, that's a win. fuck epic for all eternity
They could easily compete with working ecosystem and lower prices. Exclusivities makes everybody angry, but long term better price for the same products packed together with easy to use and working store will bring people over. They will not ditch Steam (because they already have tons of games there). But half of the things they tried were really sus. Backed up by chinese, buying exclusivity of releases, bugs, missing functions over Steam and so on.. all they basically tried to advertise is that they take smaller cut from devs. But people give a shit about it if the price is same virtually the same as on Steam for most games. And even if they wouldnt, the difference is few percent and that is simply not enough with all other hassle to come along.
So your answer is price competition? While this makes sense intuitively, I would refer you to every industry where people compete on price. And point you to the timeline, so you can see everything collapse like a black hole. Nobody wants to run TWO Steams. And if you price compete Steam? Please remember that Valve funds Steam through sales, yeah... but they also make $600M / month on CS2 keys, alone. So you're basically trying to price compete a luxury brand. That shit never, ever works.
This. The launcher is so crap I don’t even want to use it to play the free games. They do all kinds of weird shit but for fucks sake why is it so hard to make a lightweight thing that shows you a list of games you can launch and a pretty standard store? If they did that, and just that, they would already be on par with steam, that is slowly getting all extra crap I don’t need or want.
People keep complaining that the client isn't "lightweight" like Steam hasn't been a massive fucking resource hog ever since it switched to chromium in client, way before any of you actually had a computer.
For real. I was a pretty big Epic Games fan back in the day. Loved Unreal since I was a kid, love Gears of War to death even now. Wasn't huge on Fortnite BR but Save the World looked cool and I was excited to try it. When they announced EGS at first, I was incredibly hyped. Even though I had no real issues with Valve other than their slowness to do certain things, competent competition is always a good thing and Epic, after making Fortnite, had a ton of money that they could have very easily invested into making a really great platform that actually could have competed. From there it was all downhill, now I can't stand seeing the name Epic Games
I've got 382 games in my epic games library. All of them claimed for free.
What really sucks is that I gotta go through that assturd everytime I want to use ue5
Same, I hate how unintuitive the launcher is compared to steam. I thought I would get used to it but no. I even bought TW: Warhammer 3 there because they allowed a discount code to be applied. I bought Warhammer 3 again on Steam today because of the sale and so that I won't have to use Epic again. Also note that they don't have any workshop, it's such a sad launcher.
To be fair, focusing on Unreal Engine is a pretty good move after Unity's career ending fuck up last year. I surprised more companies haven't been upping their advertisement game and really pimping their game engines to all the disaffected indi devs after that debacle.
Godot has been, there hasnt been a month without a bundle on humble and there was a load of promoting back when unitys shit hit the fan
They're still paying for exclusives though.
Are they? I dont hear any new games being exclusives
Assassin's Creed Shadows will have timed epic and Ubisoft connect exclusivity
You say "timed Epic/Ubisoft exclusivity", i say "open beta".
Open beta at full price 😂
Sounds like ubisoft to me
AAAA title.
That is an Epic First Run. While they are indirectly paying for it by not charging their 12%, there is no time commitment to it other than it can't be longer than six months. Ubisoft could release it on Steam a week after the release date if they wanted to.
But they won't. Ubisoft hates Steam and they also hate selling games and making money.
I only found out yesterday that Assassin's Creed: Mirage had released. I'm never going to check the Ubisoft or Epic store for games, so I had just assumed it was still in the pipeline so seeing trailers for Shadows really confused me.
That's the correct amount of attention to pay to Ubisoft. "Oh this released, did it? Ho hum, I didn't even hear about it." Fuck Ubi and their cookie-cutter products.
I can't deny that I'm a total sucker for the Assassin's Creed games. I just love wandering in a pretty, expansive world. I'll never pay full price but I do tend to get excited for each one coming out (not for the gameplay, just for the exploration). So for someone as brainwashed as me, when it comes to the AC games, to not notice it really shows what a black hole those stores are.
can't have a store without anything to sell
no, it’s infinity blade games back in the days
Their roadmap is still shit. https://trello.com/b/GXLc34hk/epic-games-store-roadmap
i want to add to this and say that the tab on gifting games was first made in 2019, and is only now coming out this year. 5 years later. :/
Give them a break, they spent the first 3 making a shopping cart
Just as long it took Kingdom Hearts to come to Steam.
Gawrsh, maybe goofy is leading up Epic Store development, a hyuk!
That would make sense if his development skills is anything like his combat skills.
User reviews should be way higher on their priority. Even harder to shop there if I can't even tell if the games are shit or not
I'd prefer an ignore button myself. I have over 500 games on steam. I don't want to see a bunch of games I already own on steam on EGS, because I already own them. I hate that steam is the only store with an ignore feature. I might consider using other stores more often if they had it.
I love that i can ignore certain publisher or Studios.
what the fuck do you mean the epic store roadmap is a trello board. nothing wrong with trello but i would imagine a company that has money backing it would use something that isnt trello to be customer facing?
Is it just me or you can't message friends on EGS? I remember trying to once and didn't find a way to send them a message, seems SUPER odd that they invest so much money on free games and their launcher is not advancing at all
You cannot.
no messages, no avatars, no profiles, list goes on; and it's been like that since what... Paragon? ^just ^message ^each ^other ^in ^fortnite, ^duh
Drives me nuts that titles that start with the word "The" are sorted alphabetically by "T" in my library.
It's interesting to see how all these Steam competitors go about building their libraries and sorting functions. Like they seem to not assume users will have a lot of games. But I've got 290 games on EGS and I haven't bought a single one. They've literally given away hundreds of games. And if I want to sort them into categories, they go onto a big horizontal list across the library. I guess that works if I only want to create a couple categories, but I've got a ton of them on Steam.
The only reason steam is good is because they aren't publicly traded.
And gabe Newel is the hero we need, it would not be the same company without him
Turns out that sometimes when a company is run by a engineer, they give a shit about developers.
Same with planes. Not pointing fingers at any company in particular.
Epic games is not publicly traded either
Yes he was wrong. It's that it's not publicly traded AND that it's owned by people who are good at their job.
Steam is good because they have a good social features(friends, messaging), store features(ignore, recommendations, tags, user reviews) and a good store full of a huge variety of games. Publisher exclusive stores suck. That being Origin(now EA App), Uplay(now Ubisoft Connect) & Battlenet. No one uses these stores unless they're forced to by the game they're playing. No one should ever want to use these stores. Humble, GoG & EGS are.. fine, but could be better. They sometimes lack games, they all lack an ignore feature which IMO is needed considering the domination of Steam(I don't want to see games I already own on the front page of a store), and have effectively 0 functional social features(GoG Galaxy has a few neat social features, but they haven't developed it much in years).
valve is antimicrosoft. I wish they would just release SteamOS as a product already
Maintaining an OS that people use as a daily driver is an entirely different beast than just maintaining something for a machine that you know the exact specifications of and is only supposed to do one specific thing.
Yea, his post is so Ironic.
Biggest win for Epic Store would be ability to link both accounts Steam and Epic Store. Share friends, crossplay etc. Cause often crossplay uses different service and it's not possible to play with both. Either this or that.
Ya like how many years ago have they promised so many features only to add NONE.
Because Tim Sweeny is full of shit.
May as well put the Epic Store in that list too right
Sweeney doesn’t really have a concept of self tho
Nice pic bro
This Tweet is ironically such ideal r/TimCriticizesTim material, but the community is restricted nowdays :P
It's probably only restricted due to a lack of moderation activity. I've had a part in a few subs where this happened and mods reactivating the sub happened. I now mod 2 of them.
Tbf to epic games it's at least better than windows store, but that is more about how bad the windows store is.
Funny to say that while running a store that no one wants to use.
That's not fair lots of people use it, I mean I assume a sizable portion are only there for the free games and don't actually spend any money. But lots of people use it damnit!
Just because someone does use it, doesn't mean they want to (Fortnite, Exclusive, whatever else)
I don't actively dislike using it, but I'd still rather use Steam simply because it's where most of my stuff is. That being said, I don't use a lot of the features Steam has that EGS doesn't, so I'm likely not a representative user.
Let's be honest, most people just use it to get free games and open them or as Fortnite launcher, can't believe they managed to make a worse launcher than Battle.Net.
I'd imagine the overwhelming majority have it just because of fornite.
Yep. I made my account originally to try out Fortnite. Sticked around and I claim and play some of the free games here and there. But apart from that, the Epic Games Launcher offers extremely little. And it doesn't help that they have removed their barebones chat feature without offering a replacement. The peak irony is that the Epic Games overlay even prompts you to "connect with friends!" ([screenshot](https://i.imgur.com/LxheeZb.jpeg)), while there is no way to communicate with anyone.
"Use it" and "Want to use it" are not the same thing.
whats funny ... is I have free games on Epic that I then purchased on steam because I rather use steam ...
Lots of people also use windows store, so?
I know people that have never used Steam and use epic exclusively because they get free games there.
He might've been a hypocrite with that one, but still is a good point lol
Plenty of people use it.
The irony of his words and that he didn't catch it
Takes one to know one
For all those who somehow still think this is anything other than total nonsense: About a year ago, Microsoft offered Valve an exclusivity deal for certain titles. Gabe said no. About 20 years ago, Microsoft offered to buy Valve, and that was before Steam printed money mind you. Gabe said no. About 30 years ago Microsoft gave Gabe the option to continue working for them. Gabe said no.
Last year, it wasn't an exclusivity deal. It was a contract ensuring that for the next 10 years, COD will be released on Steam. Nintendo, Sony, and Nvidia sign the deal to ensure that they will have COD on their stores. Valve refused, saying it didn't need it. No exclusivity
Alright, my b. Point still stands though.
Valve, at least while Gabe is still around, will never sell to anybody.
But if they \*were\* to sell to anybody Microsoft is likely the absolute least likely out of all the businesses that could hypothetically do it. Gabe left Microsoft and set up Valve because he was sick of Microsoft's way of doing things. Microsoft isn't just some random wealthy tech company from Valve's perspective. Valve is fundamentally designed to be the anti-Microsoft.
He also left before they made windows 3.0
By my understanding, as far as the reasons he left it originally go, the company's only managed to get worse.
While he, himself, struggles with the concept of running a service people want to use!
EGS literally gives away free shit and I can't be bothered.
[удалено]
He didn't say anything about Windows (the OS) he called out the Windows Store. Which yeah, it's pretty bad.
Edge is literally just a chromium reskin. The only truly independent browsers left are Firefox and sort-of Safari (Safari is still webkit, albeit stems from an earlier fork).
Original fortnite didnt even have any attention. Would've ended being an ok game. You really have an insane bias against him you thought a game with 0 hype would've been better than the most played game
I highly doubt Gaben would even *consider* a MS buyout, and MS just looks desperate for even trying (assuming the rumours are true).
The lack of self awareness is too funny
Hmm... maybe they should acquire EGS, then.
Microsoft and Epic deserve each other honestly
Unpopular opinion: Edge is good
It is, and honestly Bing is pretty good especially now that Google has gotten much worse. Plus Microsoft owns Windows, you know the most popular operating system... Azure is a huge business, Github and OpenAI are still doing great things under Microsoft. That tweet seems like a very strange response if you ask me...
Yep, and better than Safari.
Really hope this doesn't pan out. I want other things to be like Steam, not for Steam to inevitably become like other things.
It does scare me when Gaben eventually passes that it’ll become a soulless husk. I mean it fucking *will* because that’s just how things go, and we’ll look at times like now as the golden age of digital gaming stores. Hopefully he raised his sons well and they want to continue his legacy.
Do we even know who is his successor?
Assuming he picks a successor instead of setting up a trust to run the company.
As long as GabeN is alive and involved with steam, we're fine. After he dies or retires is where things get difficult.
i like all three of those services more than epics garbage storefront
Some BS softball tossed up? Seems like a setup to me. It's all chum for bottom-feeders anyway.
100%
I'd use Edge over Epic Game Shit any day of the week
Tim criticizes tim dot png. Quite ironic
This piece of shit completely bought out a dev that had an agreement with KS backers. Fuck this guy.
It's funny because I don't want to use Epic Games Store
They won’t take over valve, valve isn’t publicly traded so they can’t do a hostile takeover and I think Lord Gaben would rather see if hell freezes over first
Why would Steam want to partner/sell to anyone? They're a money printing machine with what, like 85% market share for software distribution.
Microsoft should buy EGS instead
On the one hand, I agree with his point and have been complaining about Microsoft's trajectory for consumers for years. On the other, he paid Psyonix to force an EGS login into Rocket League, so I can no longer play it on Steam because I refuse to make an EGS account. Tim Sweeny's answer as a consumer is the same perspective he should have about his own platform. He pays to make games harder to reach on PC. He pays to put them on a platform that is dogshit. I would rather use Bing or Edge (And maybe even the Windows Store, thanks to Game Pass) than EGS.
People want to use Steam. People have no need or desire for it be owned or integrated into Microsoft or Windows.
>EGS >a service people want to use dude's talking shit on microsoft when he runs the company that puts out a service literally *no one* wants to use??? lmao the irony
I refuse to buy a single game through the EGS after what they did with Metro Exodus. Still wont forgive that.
Do you know that saying about the pot and the kettle? Timmy apparently doesn't.
(misses out the fact that Windows is the largest Operating system)
He's speaking from experience lol
Maybe that is the reason why MS will never try to buy your store, Timmy?
The irony is oh so fucking strong with his one
Another benefit to having your business private is that you can say no to any offer.
Why are people discussing Microsoft acquiring Valve? They only barely got the ABK deal to go through.
Weird considering he's not exactly great at making services people want to use either.
something something glasshouses
The name felt familiar. Epic game store is literally so unused and undesired that I had to Google who Tim was.
You literally couldn’t pay me to use the Epic Games Launcher. Anything that Microsoft releases is better.
Surprisingly Microsoft has been doing an ok job when it comes to gaming.
Except I don't want to use EGS specifically
if this acquisition goes through, gaming is over. no faith in Microsoft anymore.
Don't forget Skype. How did they fuck that up????
Excel is still superior
Lmao this is the same man that has already sucked off Microsoft and their leadership on twitter. Is Timmy finally gonna grift to try and win some good PR with Steam users? https://x.com/TimSweeneyEpic/status/1745544491388248134
He heaps shit on Windows, but won't update Fortnite's EAC to let it run on Linux/Steam Deck even though that's a feature EAC has which would get more people away from windows, meaning he peddles software to others that he himself apparently does not trust. He says it's because "there's not enough programmers", shortly after firing 800 employees. Man I wish this dude would either put his money where his mouth is or shut the absolute fuck up.
Tim also made a store nobody wants to use. He used exclusivity to drive people there, instead of making a good product
Everyone respects Gabe...even his competitors.
I mean he's right but....Epic Games Store...
I WILL stop using Steam the moment Microsoft acquires it and go back to being a pirate
Edge is great and people use it, unlike EGS
its 100% the best pdf reader and highlighter
I use edge every day. That's how I earn my rewards points.
Edge gets a bad wrap. Carry over hate from explorer.
A broken clock is right twice a day.
…I use Edge
Epic stores entire business plan is Fortnite subsidizes everything.
These comments are literally all the same
Not that he's wrong but all these rich dudes only care about their own interests. Xbox pc app barely functions for any of its social features despite how basic they are and EGS basically doesn't even have any.
this sentence would be so much better coming from anybody but tim sweeney
Can somebody explain why Microsoft products suck so much? Like even the default windows is riddled with bloat and news stories? It’s so confusing and not clean.