Gabe Newell isn't losing sleep over Microsoft and Sony's big acquisition sprees
Microsoft's recent bid to acquire Activision Blizzard was huge news: a $68.7 billion shift for the games industry that's come on top of a string of other acquisitions, including Bethesda just last year. Sony has likewise been looking to bulk up its first party studios and acquired Bungie for $3.6 billion. While Sony and Microsoft continue to expand their domains, the PC remains an open middle ground where both publish their games. And so far, at least, the billions of dollars being thrown around to buy up studios hasn't enticed Valve, the biggest name in PC gaming, into doing the same.
«You know, consolidations a lot of times can be motivated by strange reasons,» Valve president Gabe Newell said in a recent interview where we talked about the Steam Deck, the metaverse, and Steam's fraught history with Bitcoin.
«I've sat in boardrooms where people have talked about making decisions about an acquisition because they could fire a bunch of what are called G&A expenses. And it's like, really? That's what your strategy is? When you hear 'synergy,' what it really means is you're going to fire a bunch of middle managers who are overhead. Somebody whips out a spreadsheet… and [I'm] like, 'Yeah, but I don't think you understand how many of your core developers and engineers you're gonna lose because of the disruptions… you have this completely unrealistic view of what's gonna actually happen, that's motivating these decisions.»
Newell said that there have been «waves of this forever» in and outside the games industry, pointing to the popularity of conglomerate mergers in the 1970s. He also said that many of them don't last, and it's true that in recent years some of the biggest conglomerates in the US have split into separate
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