Why is it a problem, indeed? I mean, you're the one taking issue with someone pointing it out, even though it's a pretty uncontroversial observation.

I mean, there's more: there's the NFT-like marketplace of trading cards, which itself is a spinoff of their monetized tradable asset marketplace, some of which is based on user-generated content. There's the ongoing acquisition and monetization of mods. There's their original plan for "Steam Machines" being basically a spec sheet and a certification badge they would sell to hardware manufacturers. And this is more insidery, but they are definitely not beyond sending marching orders to indie devs on how to spend their budget to get store placement...

Some of those I think are good ideas, some of those I don't like at all. But they are definitely crowdsourcing effort in order to run the largest online gaming store on PC with a skeleton crew. That is not really up for debate. I don't even think Valve would argue that's not their approach.

And it is, very much, a techbro-y mildly abusive gig economy thing they do. They pretty much invented it. Valve is one of the earliest digital transformation media startups, right there with Amazonitself and very much a trendsetter for the Spotifys and Netflixes. This isn't an attack, it's a thing that happened.