It does make me wonder though about the meeting between Nexon & NCSoft with Valve, if indeed it did happen. Could there have been talks of Valve purchasing CoH and they could not reach an agreement on the price? Seeing how NCSoft published their PR BS statement shortly thereafter, could that have been one of the negotiations that wasn't successful?
Way too many questions about everything, which just fuels speculation and rumors, and no real answers.
It's certainly a thought that's crossed my mind, but as I understand it, this alleged meeting of corporate gaming giants took place at Nexon's Developer Conference in Hawaii. Not at a private meeting, or at an undisclosed hush-hush location...a Developer Conference. Which leads me to conclude that IF this meeting took place (and there's still no hard evidence it even did really), it was more likely to be about Development overlaps than mega corporate buyouts.
If I had to guess, I'd say Valve were possibly talking to Nexon about divergent technologies in gaming, i.e. how Valve recently launched their "bring Steam into the living room" interface, and how Nexon is heading more towards casual and mobile games than PC.
The media hysteria over "OMG! NCS-Nexon want to buy Valve!!" no doubt arose from the fact NCSoft acquired Ntreev (a Korean casual gaming company) earlier this year, and Nexon in turn acquired 15% of NCSoft stock, so if NCS-Nexon meet with
anyone in the game biz, someone somewhere is going to think "OMG! Scoop! I sense a buyout!"
But think about it - software developers meeting at a conference hosted by one of those developers? Well, "Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar", as the saying goes