There was quite a bit of fuss when it was reported earlier this week that Tim Cook apparently paid a visit to Valve’s headquarters. To be fair, why wouldn’t it? The CEO of one of the largest corporations in the world makes a visit to one of the bigger names in the gaming industry; thanks to this alleged meeting, it managed to spark off a ton of speculation regarding Apple and Valve possibly working together to create a gaming device of their own. Unfortunately it looks like those were merely rumors.
Valve’s co-founder, Gabe Newell, busted those rumors himself in a podcast interview (via Kotaku) from Seven Day Cooldown. In the interview, Newell was quoted as saying:
We actually, we all sent mail to each other, going, “Who’s Tim Cook meeting with? Is he meeting with you? I’m not meeting with Tim Cook.” So we’re… it’s one of those rumors that was stated so factually that we were actually confused.
No one here was meeting with Tim Cook or with anybody at Apple that day. I wish we were! We have a long list of things we’d love to see Apple do to support games and gaming better. But no, we didn’t meet with Tim Cook. He seems like a smart guy, but I’ve never actually met him.
It looks those who were hoping for some kind of amazing collaboration between Apple and Valve will be sorely disappointed. While we will not rule out the possibility of Apple perhaps one day venturing into the gaming hardware scene, we just don’t expect it to be any time soon.