We can trace a lot of things back to the bots and bad data that arose from their presence. It impacted everything and caused a great overestimation of the Splinterlands' reach. The damage to marketing is quite clear: Bad data, bad on-boarding, misunderstanding the audience, bad and isolating gameplay experience.

I don't think 'overwhelmed' is the right description of the response. They lost confidence in their own ecosystem. They always needed an external FOMO and they couldn't cultivate anything outside of the Hive space. Runi's formation story was a dead giveaway that they felt inferior and the marketing efforts reflected it. They needed gimmicks, when they had a perfectly fine game that needed certain fixes and deliverables met. Growing the game meant having to sell this ecosystem and the benefits of it to new players and build partnerships in the real world (not crypto) that would provide greater extensibility to the tokens and assets.

You don't give up on marketing when there's a market downturn. You have to figure out how your ecosystem/product provides value and get it in front of the right people and partners. They're a gaming software company with a DAO, not a pure DeFi operation. However, they didn't see things that way.