Valve Denies Nexon Acquisition Rumors

Valve has made a public statement concerning the company's rumored acquisition by large South Korean games publisher Nexon, with one of its writers, Chet Faliszek, saying that it’s pure fabrication.

Valve is one of the biggest independent developers in the world, owning not just a variety of great franchises, from Half-Life, to Left 4 Dead, Portal, or Team Fortress, but also running one of the most popular digital distribution services in the world – Steam.

As such, you can imagine that quite a lot of other companies would like to own Valve.

The latest publisher rumored to be thinking about acquiring Valve was Nexon, one of the biggest Korean companies in the online gaming space, which recently purchased a majority stake in one of its rivals, NCsoft.

The company held a meeting behind closed doors to make an offer to Valve but, according to the studio, this is just a rumor, as one of its writers, Chet Faliszek, dismissed the whole thing.

The Valve veteran explains everything as speculation, similar to when EA or Apple were being rumored to acquire Valve.

"It's weird, because Gabe [Newell, Valve boss] just gave that interview to the NYT which everyone was quoting - it's weirdly twisted how they took it,” he told GamesIndustry. "They were asking if we were going to sell out to someone and Gabe was like, we're not going to do that. The guy made the question to be about, 'how's this going to end'.”

According to Faliszek, everyone at Valve likes working there and there’s no need for an outside investor to disturb its balanced structure.

"There's no thoughts about that - everyone likes working there, we like working together we like. The culture we have and the way it works because of all the parts of it. We're not changing any of that, we're pretty happy. We're doing OK."

Considering how much Valve owes to its independent nature, it’s great to hear that the company will continue to stay that way in the future.