they don’t tend to be the manufacturer that sells at the biggest loss (if at a loss at all)

Yeah, fair enough: https://www.tweaktown.com/news/79180/xboxes-arent-profitable-but-the-nintendo-switch-certainly-is/index.html

While Sony and Microsoft sell consoles at a loss and rely on game sales, monetization, and services to turn a profit, Nintendo designed the Switch so it made a profit at the beginning of its lifespan. Every year Nintendo makes profits from Switch hardware, and in FY2021 alone, the company generated a whopping $8.2 billion from hardware sales. Hardware made up over half (57.2%) of its total gaming earnings (over $16 billion), the company said in a recent earnings report.

Still, the staffing and computing resources of online services are an ongoing cost. I wouldn’t say that Valve is quite in a similar position to Nintendo here, but I see your point that there are companies willing to lean in and expose themselves to a certain degree. I mean, Microsoft even does that by exempting certain games from requiring a Live subscription.

But Valve and Microsoft are vastly more mature than Nintendo when it comes to cloud infrastructure, and there are some side benefits to carrying that cost themselves, too, when the core of your business model depends on you having it figured out to the point that a real-world system performs well on it.

I’m just sayin, there are different concerns here and it’s a pretty reasonable ask. They’re not exactly cackling towards the sky in a dark tower with a bolt of lightning behind them saying “my evil plan to lock basic functionality behind a paywall is finally complete!” with their $20/year service.

I think there’s room for both of us to be right here. At least, so long as you agree that it still costs Valve and Microsoft money to foot the bill for their free (to the consumer) online services, they just choose to not pass the cost along because it gives them other advantages that may not be universally applicable to every vendor.