• BURN@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    88
    arrow-down
    3
    ·
    1 year ago

    There’s no chance GabeN sells Steam. It prints money and only looks to increase their profitability over the coming years.

    Microsoft can’t buy them anyways at this point I think. The regulatory bodies didn’t like ActiBlizzard, and this would be similar scale, if not larger

    • Random Dent@lemmy.ml
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      40
      arrow-down
      1
      ·
      1 year ago

      I do worry about what might happen when he gets too old/decides to step down though.

      If Microsoft did somehow end up buying them I might have to just nope out of gaming altogether. Or just take to the high seas I guess.

      • BURN@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        32
        arrow-down
        2
        ·
        1 year ago

        I have to imagine he has something planned (inb4 GabeN AI Overlord) for after he’s gone.

        He’s a bit crazy about prepping for disaster iirc. He lives in New Zealand now and has since the Covid outbreak. I’d be surprised if there wasn’t a very long document that lays out a lot of rules for if he’s gone and Steam is to continue

      • redcalcium@lemmy.institute
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        10
        arrow-down
        1
        ·
        1 year ago

        At that point I’ll probably too old and have lost interest in gaming anyway, so I’ll just let the next generation of gamers figure it out themselves. Kinda like boomers leaving us to deal with high property price problem because it’s no longer their concern anymore.

        • master5o1@lemmy.nz
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          2
          ·
          1 year ago

          Nah it’s still their concern too. They’re mostly just on the beneficial side of it.

    • Neato@kbin.social
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      3
      arrow-down
      1
      ·
      1 year ago

      The regulatory bodies didn’t like ActiBlizzard,

      But they did allow it, unfortunately. And MS could simply argue that it already has dominance in the PC space as 96% of PC gamers are Windows users. So owning Steam is just buying 1 out of many stores (here they tout Epic, Amazon, etc).
      I mean it’s a bad argument but MS made a lot of bad arguments to get their way and they seemingly worked.

      • lorty@lemmy.ml
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        1
        ·
        1 year ago

        Activision-Blizzard-King isn’t a dominant company in any segment. You can’t say the same for steam. Regulators would have a much easier time blocking such an acquisition.

        • Buddahriffic@lemmy.world
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          3
          ·
          1 year ago

          Plus, at least from my perspective, Activision-Blizzard was already bad enough that if MS made it worse, it wouldn’t affect me because they were already bad enough that I’d swore off their games. MS owning them was an improvement or at worst more of the same.

          That’s absolutely not the case for Valve. They are one of the few large companies that I respect plus they are playing a big role in breaking the windows stranglehold over OSes when you like to play games.

          The level of popular opposition to MS acquiring Valve would be on a whole other level than the opposition to the blizzard acquisition. It might even rival the opposition to Nvidia acquiring ARM.

    • echo64@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      1
      arrow-down
      4
      ·
      edit-2
      1 year ago

      The regulatory bodies hand waved actiblizzard through. Let’s not pretend anything else happened there. Microsoft can do whatever they want and no one is gonna stop them. Same as every other big company.

      The only thing stopping Ms. is that valve is a privately owned company. But everyone has a price.

      • lorty@lemmy.ml
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        1
        arrow-down
        1
        ·
        1 year ago

        The same regulatory bodies that sued to block the deal without any convincing case “handwaved” it?

        • echo64@lemmy.world
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          1
          ·
          1 year ago

          Yes, that is just how the American system works. The actual body here is the doj. The ftc tried to sue and was slapped back immediately. This was the ftc trying to show claws and the actual ruling body saying no, you have no power and Microsoft can do what they want.

          It was a huge loss for the ftc that has been trying, and failing to fight big tech