Would EA Buy Valve?

Speaking in an interview Valve's marketing director, Doug Lombardi, has said that if anyone is interested in buying the software house, he's "happy to have that conversation."

That doesn't mean that Valve's necessarily courting suitors, of course. "By the same token, the company's doing pretty well, and we're really happy with what we're doing”, Lombardi went on. "So we'll see. I mean, anything is possible."

OK, so we shouldn't jump to any conclusions just yet. That said, looking at some of the Valve man's comments about Electronic Arts, which is currently trying to buy Take-Two, SPOnG can't help but wonder if they'd make a happy couple.

Lombardi is happy to acknowledge that Valve had misgivings about its distribution deal with EA, saying, "... we set up the deal so that it turned out that if EA was this evil empire, that it wasn't going to last forever."

BUT (yes, there's a 'but'), Lombardi went on to say, "But it's turned out that all those scary stories - which, you know, maybe some of them were true, and maybe some of them are history; I don't know - haven't appeared to us; we haven't seen the boogeyman."

Furthermore, it sounds like EA has been quite appreciative about Steam. "EA was very progressive about saying, 'We understand who you guys are. We understand what Steam is. We don't want Steam to go away.' Well, they might want Steam to go away, but they're not asking us to make Steam go away", said Lombardi.

Valve's deal with EA comes following what Lombardi calls “the Vivendi divorce”. Vivendi previously published Valve games such as Half Life 2, but between 2002 and 2005 Valve and Sierra, a label of Vivendi, were involved in a series of court cases surrounding copyright infringement and breach of copyright. Following Vivendi Games' merger with Activision, Activision Blizzard represents EA's main competition for dominance in the arena of third-party games publishing.

So, we have EA – a publisher that has been aggressively pursuing acquisition in the form of the Take-Two deal (and may have some cash to spend if the deal doesn't go ahead), as well as the likes of BioWare and Pandemic. Then we have Valve, a successful software house with some proven IP and a digital distribution platform that could serve EA very well. They seem to get along. If SPOnG were in the business of matchmaking, we'd be giving them both a wink and a nudge...

^{Source: Gamasutra}