Other things she might have said that you don't agree with don't invalidate this point. She doesn't need to have any paid games anywhere to see a flaw in the system.
Its nearly the same argument that publishers have against piracy. That being getting their content for free, hurts the publishers and developers bottom line.
A point that has been debated to death and has been found for the vast majority of cases to be completely unfounded and untrue.
Other things she might have said that you don't agree with don't invalidate this point. She doesn't need to have any paid games anywhere to see a flaw in the system.
And it absolutely invalidates the point. If the point is that;
It really does hinder smaller indie developers from getting paid in the end which is disappointing.
You need to be in a position to analyze actual data and be able to make a rational argument based on facts, which she is not as a developer who has no paid-games that are affected by the system. For all Nina Freeman knows, sales numbers could actually increase because buyers are less hesitant to spend a couple dollars on a risky title that they've been eyeing once the risk is alleviated.
Nina Freeman's standpoint, like yours posted above, is based purely on speculation. And the standpoint is being pushed as "fact" by Nina and friends/associates who is not in the position to have reliable and accurate data on the matter.
And so until that data is collected and analyzed, criticism of a system on speculation is quite literally just opinions. Much in the same way that "piracy is killing __________" is largely just an opinion and not based in or substantiated by any factual evidence. Taken with a grain of salt.
I think a smarter approach would be to take a percentage of user's play time against general gameplay time for games under a certain length.
This seems like a reasonable compromise, but there are still outliers that wouldnt fit. At some point there are going to be games that the system is incapable of protecting as much as others, no matter what the system is. And thats a compromise that is going to have to be made by Valve, and any game developer who chooses to use Steam as a distribution platform.