Gamers Have Become Less Interested in Strategic Thinking and Planning
quanticfoundry.com
quanticfoundry.com
It used to be that "gamers" were either console or PC specific, and these platforms not only naturally allowed for more complex games but also attracted a specific demographic who prefered games with more challenge, strategy elements, and planning. But now "gamers" is much more diverse. The casual mobile afk gaming demographic has eclipsed that of the more serious and old school gamer persona, and by design and nature mobile games tend be much less strategic.
https://store.steampowered.com/
Top games this week includes 2 RTS, 1 survival game with PvP, 1 strategic shooter game and a hardcore open world game that won "game of the year" last year, it contradicts this article
Games like StarCraft are all about clicking very quickly and accurately (APM).
AlphaStar (AI) was capped at 264 APM which was apparently considered fair to humans, but burst actions possibly gave it an edge.
A human player would have to move his mouse to the unit, click on the unit, then click on a point on the ground to move it to, then move the screen, then move his mouse to select another unit, then move his mouse to the location where he wanted that unit to go, and so on, which would introduce considerable latency, whereas Alphastar was able to move around multiple individual units simultaneously in different directions even though they're on opposite sides of the screen (or not even on the same screen) which is physically impossible for a human player (keep in mind with the number of units we're dealing with, a human would have entire groups of units hotkeyed, he would not be able to select an individual unit with a hot key).
People focus on the APM but ignore the fact that even with "only" 200 APM Alphastar was moving units around in a way that no human ever could. And that imo was a big part of what made Alphastar strong - the strategies it used, a lot of them relied on the fact that it could do this impossible (for a human) micro. That's why Alphastar spammed stalkers whereas humans don't use stalkers so much, because Alphastar could micro the stalkers in a way that no human being could.
Most of the time there's a certain central archetype of optimal play(maximize resource income&spending, optimize build order), and very little moment-to-moment salient decision-making that requires adapting to circumstances(excepting micro which is never fun). Contrast that with roguelites and the way every single time you play you're offered different options, have to adapt to them, and work out a build viable in both the short- and long- term.