Valve's Enterprise Value Estimated At $3 Billion

[lothar]

now the question is will Activision follow EA in creating their own store? why pay Steam if you can do it yourself?

The problem with that is I won't follow them if they do.
I only use STEAM period, and don't plan to use another game downloading client service.

The only exception to this would be Blizzard.
I had Impulse solely for Stardock. When they bolted and sold it to Gamestop, I left Impulse and re-bought the GalCiv2 games that I had on Impulse on STEAM.

 

[Maximilian]

They could buy two of these things:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burj_Khalifa

 

[alent1234]

valve enabled publishers to lower their risk and rode the wave of best buy and others shrinking their PC game sections.

if you print a million retail copies of a game and they don't sell then the publisher has to take them back and eat the cost. steam eliminated that risk

and the profit margins on games are pretty low so most retail stores don't want to stock them or give them very little shelf space. steam solved that problem as well

the last was the rise of laptops over desktops. people going on trips and wanting to take their games with them with no disks. steam solved that problem as well.

now that all these problems have been solved the publishers are looking to cut costs even more and their own stores is the answer.

and one of Jack Welch's most famous quotes is "Don't let anything get between you and your customers." Just look at what happened last year when EA and MS went head to head about MMO fees for some game

 

[wuliheron]

Publishers like EA never needed Valve to provide a service they could do on their own and declining retail sales don't account for why Steam in particular became a huge online success for downloading games. The bottom line is Steam provided a quality of service no one else was willing or able to produce including automatic updates to any game you download. The only reason everyone is suddenly jumping on the bandwagon now is because Steam made big bucks.

 

[HardcoreRobot]

long live steam!

(seriously, i want to keep my games)

 

[Inspector Jihad]

won't ever use another client and won't ever buy a hard copy. EA can suck shit with origin.