There's definitely some truth to that. But looking back on arXiv there are papers going back years, including from Harvard/UofT [1], Tencent [2], Facebook [3],

There's definitely some truth to that. But looking back on arXiv there are papers going back years, including from Harvard/UofT [1], Tencent [2], Facebook [3], etc. There has also been an SC1 tournament running since at least 2011 [4] I'm sure that the AlphaStar effort absolutely dwarfed everything that came before in terms of investment (as I'm sure AlphaGo did for Go as well) but based on my reading I'd also bet that Starcraft has likely seen the most continued AI research effort of any imperfect information, real-time game over the last decade - I think that's also part of what made it appealing for DeepMind over Dota 2 or any of the other options in this class of game. [1] https://arxiv.org/pdf/1909.02682.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/1909.02682.pdf [2] https://arxiv.org/pdf/1907.09467.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/1907.09467.pdf [3] https://arxiv.org/pdf/1906.12266.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/1906.12266.pdf [4] https://liquipedia.net/starcraft/SSCAIT https://liquipedia.net/starcraft/SSCAIT