Doug Lombardi, marketing VP at Valve has said their relationship with publishing giant EA is ”really good,” and they haven’t dealt with an ”evil empire”.
The studio is doing well that Lombardi says that when it comes to buyout talks they’re ”happy to have that conversation,” whether with EA or someone else.
”By the same token, the company’s doing pretty well, and we’re really happy with what we’re doing,” he added, talking with Gamasutra. ”So we’ll see. I mean, anything is possible.”
Valve’s positive time with EA was in fact a key factor in id Software’s John Carmack decision to let the publisher distribute their upcoming action title ‘Rage’ on PC and consoles.
Lombardi explained that they ”set up the deal so that it turned out that if EA was this evil empire, that it wasn’t going to last forever,” but goes on to praise the giant saying that ”all those scary stories–maybe some of them were true, and maybe some of them are history; I don’t know–haven’t appeared to us. We haven’t seen the boogeyman.”
”EA was very progressive about saying, ‘We understand who you guys are. We understand what Steam is. We don’t want Steam to go away,’” he continued. ”Well, they might want Steam to go away, but they’re not asking us to make Steam go away.”
Source: Shacknews
