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According to a number of rumors this morning, Google is about to acquire the well-known game development company Valve. Valve is best known for its Half-Life games and Steam, a content distribution platform which it uses to sell and distribute PC games from various developers with the help of a desktop client. Currently, Steam distributes close to 440 games and has over 15 million active users. We assume that Google is mostly interested in the technology behind Steam and no so much in the distribution or game development business of Valve.
Steam's technology would definitely be a good fit for Google, which, thanks to YouTube and other ventures, is getting more and more invovled in the content distribution business. On the other hand, though, while pushing out 30,000 Mbit of data is surely no easy feat, we can't help but wonder about why Google would need to acquire them. After all, if anybody has a lot of experience in distributing massive amounts of data, it would be Google itself.
Overall, even though the Inquirer cites "well placed sources," we can't help but wonder if this rumor will pan out to be true. Maybe Google will only take over the Steam part of Valve's business, or the two will announce some form of partnership.
Google, for the sake of your credibility, don't bother playing Microsoft's monopolistic game. For the record, I'm not very happy with this decision, they really don't need the technology behind steam.
Theres nothing at all wrong with them buying Valve. All these companies are out to make money (and some seem to have a serious problem with that, for reasons that escape me), and buying this technology will definitely help with that
That's what I don't understand, how can Google buying Valve hurt the consumer? And I also don't see how this can stifle innovation as you say. If anything, Google buying Valve would be a good thing for Valve and the consumers who use their products (though I'm not one of them myself)
Part of Valve's success was their independence. I'd like to see how this plays out, I want to work there [Valve].
I'm on the fence, but I guess this is better then EA buying them out. Why Google though? Do they want to get into the games business? Lot's of interesting motive questions that are unanswered.
EDIT: Whew it looks like this was false
This post has been edited by KYA: 17 Sep, 2008 - 02:26 PM
Trustworthiness. I for one believe Google isn't just a monopoly trying to whore out every sector of the IT market, and from what I've seen they have made some very intuitive and interesting additions to technology, especially open-source. Buying random companies isn't always the answer imo. If Google were to own valve, Google could start telling valve how to do their job instead of doing their own thing, doing their stuff. As KYA previously mentioned, a major part of valves success was the fact they were an independent developer.
While I am a fan of the Half Life games, I was not too impressed with Steam. If I go out and buy a game on CD/DVD, why should I then need an internet connection to play it? If for whatever reason (connection problems, not paying the bill, whatever) you cannot connect to Steam, it does not allow you to play HL2. I tried this when BT was having problems at the local telephone exchange and I could not get online.
17 Sep, 2008 - 08:28 AM
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