EA has tried acquiring Valve for $1 billion and fortunately hasn’t succeeded

In a recently published New York Times article, Valve delves into, among other things, the developer’s experimentations  with augmented reality as well as the well-known fact that Valve is an awesome company to work for, though chances are you already knew that. What you may not know, is that despite now having a digital content delivery service directly competing with Steam, EA has attempted to buy Valve in the past with the lure of over $1 billion.

Despite EA’s best efforts to court the beloved developer, they didn’t succeed, which is probably a good thing to anyone who values and respects Valve’s commitment and loyalty to their customer base. Gabe Newell himself told the Times that Valve would rather “disintegrate” than be bought.

“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,’” he said.

The news has a touch of irony, considering EA has had several tiffs with Valve in the past and has been outspoken in their goal of directly competing with Steam through the publisher’s own digital content delivery service in Origin.

Elsewhere in the article, Valve talks about their current augmented reality project, which the article’s author describes as being reminiscent of Google’s “Project Glass.” One of the project’s leads, Michael Abrash, stated that devices capable of credible augmented reality games could be three to five years away, though he said virtual reality glasses will arrive sooner. Abrash also said that Valve has not yet decided on whether to develop their own augmented reality hardware, saying that the developer’s goal is to share its designs openly.