Full disclosure here, I'm currently working for a company that deals with PR and marketing and those sorts of things, so of course I'm going to argue things from that side of the fence. That said:
We are now living in the age of social media. When Steam first launched, sites like Facebook and Twitter were still in their infancy, or didn't even exist yet. But that was then. Today, if you expect to get anywhere with the gaming community, you need to be willing to communicate directly with your fans through social media. Whether that means having your developers do it themselves or, more commonly, hiring someone to do PR and communications on the developers' behalf, communication is now one of the most important tools out there. This is the information age we are living in, and consumers therefore expect information from companies like Valve.
The rest of the industry has been getting on-board with this, and we've seen the results. Nintendo just dominated E3 by using social media to directly address fans and provide them with streamed gameplay. Sony has the PS Blog where they interview developers and show off games of their own. Microsoft has the Major Nelson Podcasts, videos, and other ways to tell their fans what's happening. All three have twitter feeds, facebook pages, youtube channels, Twitch accounts... look, over the last few years, we have seen the gaming community develop into a real online community, and developers and publishers have now engaged with that community. They give us info directly, we then get to parse and examine that info. It doesn't even have to be revealing. Nintendo's developers are still as secretive as ever, the company has simply made sure that fans are kept up to date on news and relevant news.
If Valve refuse to employ any kind of Community Management or Public Relations staff, then they really are putting their heads in the sand. they've got a digital storefront with, last I heard, around 50 million (EDIT 75 million) people signed up and actively using it. Those 75 million people deserve to know if and when certain things are happening. Steam servers going down for maintenance? We should know. Updates coming to the storefront? We should know. Changes happening to the terms of service? We should know. This lack of engagement from Valve is as bad as their unwillingness to invest in an actual curation department, instead offloading the work onto the community through Greenlight.
This is 2014, and there is no excuse for a multi-billion dollar corporation with 75 million+ users to employ the basic staff to handle information releases and community management. "Bu-bu-but we want to focus on the software." Really? Because you sure seem happy paying marketing guys whenever there's a new L4D or Portal game coming out. Are the guys who put L4D posters all over London underground the same guys who did coding and gameplay design? I very much doubt it. So why pay marketing folks there, and not pay to have a basic Community Management team? This is a case of Valve wanting to get by on minimal effort when it comes to actually keeping the community up to date on things, and when every other company up to and including Nintendo is making the effort, there really is no excuse.
PR is important. It keeps your fans up to date, in the know. Trying to run everything behind the scenes just turns people off when it ends up going badly, as we saw just recently with the developer getting banned from Steam debacle. Get it together Valve.