You actually save money because you don’t have to pay people to promote the product. The bots do the work of a hundred employees and they do it for almost free. You set up a PC for $500 bucks, in an office corner, and pay the electricity bill, and that’s it.
If there are bot modes, then it’s easy to make them play on the ladder (with minor modifications).
The top SC2 streamer “back in the day” had 12k viewers on his channel alone (Idra). Nowadays, it’s common for the entire SC2 category to sum up to less than 500 total viewers across all streamers. The GSL’s iconic duo “Tastetosis” just broke up after, what, a decade of casting SC2? The writings on the wall. The game isn’t dead, but it’s on life support.
I don’t buy that either. What percentage of posts go without even a single upvote. “Big” threads might have 300. It’s a pretty small community. That might be the fault of the moderators or otherwise not reflect the popularity of the game, but it’s likely indicative of poor game health.
Do you know Valheim? It was made by some random kid and it sold 6 million copies. SC2’s first expansion sold 6 million copies. Blizzard is being outperformed.
The way I see it is that if there is no discernible difference then they are effectively the same, regardless of what the actual case is.
My experience is that dunces are far more abundant online than in real life. I think below a certain threshold, they can’t do any real work without it being counter-productive, because they just make too many mistakes. So, society inundates them with a bit of welfare cash and video games / the internet. Creating trouble on the internet is basically irrelevant, but creating trouble in the real world results in big problems. So, society funnels these people to the internet to keep them out of trouble. They get to play call of duty -all day, every day- and that makes them happy and society happy.
From there, you run into them basically all the time when online. I have never in my entire life encountered even a single person as crazy as typical internet people. I’ve met some people who think essential oils can cure cancer, but those people are like Einstein compared to internet people.
Just in another thread somebody couldn’t understand how a 14 second lag in your reaction time (in SC2) is a game-losing mistake in almost every game scenario. If you ignored the first reaper for 14 seconds, it would kill half your starting workers. These people think the nydus is overpowered because it wins the game if you don’t react to it, but it gives 14 seconds to react. Instantly, he starts whining about how reapers can’t be compared to the nydus work and “blah blah blah.” To tell the truth, I didn’t read it because I knew it would be a waste of time. These are the kinds of people that you have to deal with on the internet. Basic comparisons between units in a video game is far beyond their abilities.
I am a Grandmaster at SC2. They know I am a Grandmaster. I know they are gold league, and they know I know they are gold league. They still have to write paragraphs of text about how I am wrong to compare reapers and the nydus, and they actually expect me to read it. That’s the internet in a nutshell. I am 95% certain they just copy text from chat GPT and paste it onto the forums. That’s where my beliefs are at right now. 