EA would like to buy every company, but I am sure Valve would not sell them selfs out, when there games are so good, that the pre-orders they get pay off the production costs of there game! Also, valve has a major advantage over EA (enough to make EA abide to there wishes) which is called Steam. Steam is so successful, that some EA games only make it because of Steam. Also, what would EA want with Valve any ways? It's not like EA is short of producing companies (the even own some, like Maxis, who makes Spore and the Sims, which are both huge successes). EA is worth several billion, and they have no need to buy producing companies, when the money lies in the publishers. They lost 2Kgame (which makes my second favorite game, Civilization 4), which is a publisher, and they would have better bets holding a large portion of the stock for a developer (like Velve), so not only do they make money if the game is a success, but they double the money with there stocks going up. So in my opion, EA has no reason to buy Valve (and btw, about 80% of games by Valve are published by EA).
