Granted, it's all petty crap and not worth getting upset or frustrated about, but it's still a negative and worrisome change. Valve has long worked to keep people on Steam exclusively and off their competitors' services, and a dumb meta cow-clicker is just going to make more people feel invested in their accounts. Steam isn't a terrible service, and it's done good things for the PC market, but these aggressive tactics at keeping people more or less addicted to it is alarming.
See, I disagree with you here. Valve has long understood the concept of value-added when it comes to Steam. It's what made Steam the #1 DD platform, because it delivered services well and gave you plenty of
optional perks just by being a member. You could point to their gamification of sales, coupons and the like as just simply trying to addict their users and freeze out the competition....but you could also point to it being business smart, beneficial for Valve, dev houses and players and even fun for some people.
And let's face it. The other DD platforms aren't as successful as Steam because they don't have the reach, the features, the catalog or the value added benefits. Valve doesn't make people sign no competition clauses either. So, I have a hard time buying into the idea other platforms aren't succeeding because "Steam be keepin' em down."
In the future, when the PC market is more developed and less dependent on Steam, it'd suck to have Valve and Steam be a drain on developer income just because people wanted to horde virtual cards.
That's....quite a leap of logic you're making. Especially in a world "less dependent on Steam."