Rumour claims Microsoft is preparing a $16B offer to acquire Valve

There have been plenty of rumours over the years claiming that major game publishers have put in offers to acquire Valve, the company behind huge IP like Half-Life and Portal. Given that Valve also owns and operates the Steam Store, the company has never exactly been hurting for cash, so the idea that anyone would be able to buy them has often been scoffed at. However, that isn't stopping this from popping up in headlines again this week, as it has been claimed that Microsoft is preparing an offer. 

Dior, a gaming-focused creator who is known in the Counter-Strike community, has claimed to have heard that Microsoft is preparing a $16 billion offer to acquire Valve Corporation, a deal that would also presumably include the Steam Store, the most popular PC gaming platform.

There are plenty of reasons why this would make good sense for Microsoft, as the company is desperate to get into the handheld market, something that Valve already has a foothold in thanks to the Steam Deck. Beyond that, it would vastly improve Microsoft's PC gaming revenue, as owning the Steam Store is essentially like owning a money printer.

However, there are few reasons to believe this makes any sense for Valve. As already stated, the Steam Store is a money printer, with some estimates putting it at over $10 billion per year in revenue. The company itself is estimated to be valued at around $8 billion and according to Forbes, Gabe Newell, Valve co-founder and CEO, has a networth of over $4 billion by himself, although networth doesn't directly translate into immediate cash available.

Valve is a privately owned company and has been for the entirety of its existence, so we get very few public details about the company's finances and the true value of something like the Steam Store, or IP like Counter-Strike, Dota and Half-Life, remains a complete mystery. Any PC gamer would likely guess that Valve would be worth far more than $16 billion.

The source of this rumour, Dior, also claimed that Gabe Newell owns less than 25 percent of Valve, which would be where a large chunk of his multi-billion dollar networth is coming from. Unless Newell suddenly wants to cash-in and retire, I don't see Valve entertaining any buyout offers, let alone from Microsoft. However, it is known that many Valve employees do hold stock options, so if a massive offer is made, it would be put to a vote.

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KitGuru Says: This rumour is not verified and we have questions about the sources of some of the information publicly available about Valve. The company has been notoriously private for decades, so I would expect that landing on an exact revenue figure for Steam, or a true valuation of the entire company, would be very difficult, even with data scraping tools. 

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