I hope you are not serious. For starters, Valve is not for sale.

Since Valve is a private company 100% owned by Gabe Newell, a guy who loves gaming and is already independently wealthy in his own right, I doubt you'd ever see it put up for sale or even go public for that matter.

He owns 100% of it? The guy is one massive cardiac failure away from answering the age-old question "What happens to my games when Steam shuts down?". (just kidding, don't take it too seriously)

This is,imo, one of the reason Steam is putting such a focus on indies. Once every big publisher has got his own digital store functioning, it could hurt Steam badly. Valve doesn't really have that many IPs going for it. EA is already moving away, what if Ubi and Squenix follow suit?

Just from my own purchasing experience in the last 4 months, i can say that Amazon is the biggest threat to Steam. I have bought alot of games on Amazon that i would have normally bought on Steam, but the Amazon deals are just too good. I have yet to buy a single game from Origin.

Just as an example, Amazon had Just Cause 2 for $2.50 and the best Steam sale is still $5. Thats a 50% savings. Alot of Steam buyers are buying from Amazon and i think Amazon will eat more and more of Steam's market share.

Nah there are at least 6 current % owners plus Gabe never owned 100% he had a partner in founding so at most he has 50%

As for it not being for sale when has THAT ever stopped a hostile takeover bid all EA would need is the support of the board to force the current CEO (Gabe) to take it.

Since Valve isn't publicly traded, EA has no way to get the support of the board go get Gabe to sell it. In a publicly traded company this is attained by buying lots of shares to the company, which is impossible to do in ValvE's case.

In private companies you can skip the shares you just buy the board.

Steamworks games are probably not the best example to use there. If prices of any games are gonna be better on other retailers it's Steamworks games. Else why would anyone buy one there and not on Steam?

And you really think Gabe is stupid enough not to procure himself a practical majority of the company? Plus the board would have to be made of pretty stupid people in valve's case to agree to that. Steam is a goddamned money printing machine, who'd want to let it go for a fixed amount of money?

Not really a games deal, but if any of you use Curse (Or want to get free stuff for Everquest 2 since it the promo is still active) and want a free month for free, use the code 'newsletter12'.

someone being offered a % of next years revenue + bonus and shares in EA
0.1% of EA plus voting shares guaranteed positions for the next X years etc etc how do you think other private games companies have become "Wholly owned subsidiaries"?

You probably miss the realworld numbers. Valve is far to big and fast growing to be purchased by EA.

Just a few facts easily found on the web.

EA's 2011 gross revenues are about $3.5 billion
Valve, as a private company doesn't disclose much numbers but for 2010 there was a (probably not that bad) estimate grossing almost $1 billion.
Valve released the info that they doubled their sales in 2011 - they didn't tell they doubled their revenues so it's probably less but let's just guess it increased by 50% to roughly $1.5 billion.

In other words ... sweet little Valve with "basically" just a webstore and a frontend to download/start games is almost half as "big" as EA with all the different plattforms they have to support, the whole physical products/worldwide retail distribution and alomst not growth (2010 was almost the same as 2011 for EA).

If anything there may be a chance to just combine the companies to EA Valve, just like Activision Blizzard - but as there's absolutely no advantage/reason for Valve to do this.

Btw. the partner who Gabe founded Steam with left the company and dissolved the partnership in 2000.

Ok, it's been a whole page of posts about "Valve vs EA" in the Gaming deals thread. Why don't you create a separate thread for that kind of discussion? Even better, create it on the Steam forums. Thanks.

You're more than right ...

So, GreenManGaming has Darkspore for 3.99 UKP - seems a pretty good deal (haven't played the game though).

IndieGala2 just added http://www.rubicondev.com/fruitblitz/ to the bundle (only Android).