Google looking to acquire Valve for Android Market distribution?

[MarkP]

According to theinquirer.net and their 'well placed sources', Google are set to announce the acquisition of game developer Valve.

But what do Google want with a game developer?

Behind Valve is Steam - a content distribution platform.

Steam is a successful digital distribution, digital rights management, multiplayer and communications platform developed by Valve Corporation. It is used to distribute and manage (sometimes exclusively) a wide range of games entirely over the internet, stretching from one-man independent efforts to some of the world’s most popular. Steam is set apart from its peers in terms of functionality primarily by its residency in the system tray, and the desktop tasks that the client software performs, which will be detailed in the article, to make use of that position. - via Wikipedia

Given the fact that Valve currently publish over 440 games to 15 million active users via Steam it's safe to say the system scales pretty well indeed.

Google's recently announced Android Market will be the main distribution vehicle for applications and other software content for the Android platform, and what better system than to use Valve's Steam backend to power it.

Google has unveiled details of the Android Market open content distribution system on the Android Developers Blog. This will help end users find, purchase, download and install various types of content on their Android-powered mobile devices. Developers will be able to offer their content on an open system hosted by Google.

What do you guys think? It certainly looks like Google plan to give the iPhone store a run for it's money.