Blaming Valve for microtransactions and always online games is kind of retarded. That disclaimer wasn't some hidden instruction that suddenly gave shitty game companies an epiphany to add MTX and limited-time events to their games. Rather, its pointing out the obvious fact that a person wouldn't have any reason to buy your game when he can just download it online for free if there's nothing incentivizing him to buy it legally. That's the unfortunate truth of selling a product made of easily-reproducible digital nothing and applies to every game development firm, from single-person independent developers to billion dollar companies.
Besides, those money-making practices originated with MMOs, which solidified their moneymaking concepts, peaked, then cratered in relevance before Valve even released the first CSGO skin. Memberships, daily quests, expansions, limited-time events, item trading, all of that existed and was proven to be lucrative LONG beforehand, and there's more evidence pointing to the big mobile game boom of the early late 2000's-2010's with shitty little games like Clash of Clans or Farmville making billions off of similar practices and utterly dwarfing the console and PC markets in terms of revenue being the root cause. Seeing all that money up for the taking would have motivated Sony, Microsoft, Nintendo, and everyone else to start forcing MTX and engagement schemes into their own games more than anything that could have come out of Gabe's fat mouth.
I won't disagree that Valve's own success with hats, skins, cards, etc. contributed to the expansion of these bad practices, but they certainly weren't the first and they're far from the biggest offenders in the market. It's like blaming the pinning the spread of AID's on the heroin needle when it was really the guy who fucked a chimp 50 years ago.
