It's a very Valve answer, and it's likely the correct one. It feels very similar to their stance on piracy - it's a service problem. If you make the experience good enough people wont do it.

I actually think the games with the best communities are going to see an increase of play time, not a decrease, especially games with mod support or custom games. I had an international flight a week ago and I felt like playing CIV, so I had Claude make me a mod for it before I took off. It built a full new civ, new tile improvements, technologies, and 3d models, and it worked great.

This isn't much of a response, what they said amounts to that you should work harder to cultivate a community that you can then funnel into their platform. "Launching isn't the finish line" is obviously true but what has been happening is that people are sniped before launch based on their demo and marketing material, so it's not all that relevant.

Valve ought to be funding lawsuits against these bootleggers. Steam can only exist if indie developers feel confident they can publish there. It's as much a threat to them as anyone else, and indie studios can figure out for themselves they need to market harder but can't necessarily embark on a lawsuit.

Arguably some mass market AAA games already were slop.

In a future with millions of games released every day discoverability or curation of the great games will be really important (even more than it is now).

So marketing wins again, I guess.