Google has interest in buying video game maker Valve Software, according to a report in The Inquirer.
Activity on Valve’s Steam Powered service currently crests with about 1.2 million users.
Bellevue, Wash.-based Valve made its name with the well known Half Life series, but The Inquirer’s Charlie Demerjian speculates the reason Google would be most interested in the company is its Steam Powered technology, a multipurpose online hub with throngs of users.
That rationale makes some sense to me as well, in part because getting into the video game business in and of itself doesn’t sound terribly well aligned with Google’s mission “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” Steam is an online foundation for selling and distributing games, updating patches, enabling multiplayer online chat, and using digital rights management to control who has permission to use elements like game versions or game terrain.
Steam Powered shows 448 games available now, and in February, Valve said Steam had 15 million account holders. But this is the more telling statistic: During peak hours, online activity crests at about 1.2 million users every day. That’s clearly a lot of activity.
Update 9:40 a.m. PDT: Gaming site Kotaku threw some cold water on the report after speaking to Doug Lombardi, Valve’s director of marketing. The site said Lombardi called the Google acquisition report “purely a rumor, a bit of fiction.” Though that wasn’t a direct quote, and there’s some wiggle room in the wording, Kotaku also concluded that Google is “out of the picture.”
In my opinion, 15 million account holders on Steam make this a lucrative and tempting buy out, rumor or not. That’s a lot of people to have under your wing.
