Electronic Arts was prepared to purchase Valve for $1 billion and would have acquired Valve's intellectual properties and Steam digital distribution platform, according to a new report from The New York Times.
The New York Times claims to have spoken to two unidentified sources with knowledge of the discussion. The sources could not be named and spoke on condition of anonymity because the talks were private.
"Valve has been pursued over the years by Electronic Arts, which would very likely have valued Valve at well over $1 billion had the talks progressed that far," according to the The New York Times Article.
However, Valve company president Gabe Newell said the Valve would "disintegrate" rather than be purchased by another a company.
"It's way more likely we would head in that direction than say, 'Let's find some giant company that wants to cash us out and wait two or three years to have our employment agreements terminate,' " Newell said.
According to the article, "Michael Pachter, an analyst at Wedbush Securities, estimates that the company could be worth around $2.5 billion today," which is more than double the supposed EA offer. Although the article doesn't specify the time frame of the EA offer.
Valve's Steam online distributor service has more than 40 million active users and that, according to the article, accounts for about 70 percent of the PC games bought and downloaded from the Web.
EA launched their own digital distribution service called Origin and remove new EA games from Steam, Valve's digital distribution service. Valve has become a gatekeeper in the downloadable game distribution arena with Steam. Many believe the reason EA created Origin and removed its games from Valve's distributor service was because of Steam's policy of taking a cut of all revenue generated from a game.
Valve continues to innovate the platform and it is believed that sometime this week, Valve will supposedly launch the first public beta test of "big picture" mode for Steam, a transformation that's designed to widen the service's accessibility beyond traditional uses. The new mode is meant to allow gamers to play their games on their traditionally larger TV monitors.
According to The New York Times article, "On Monday, the company will begin a public test of a new television-friendly interface, Big Picture, for buying Steam games and playing them on computers in the living room."
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