people here are not exposed to that marketing budget though it's genuinely word of mouth from others (who are exposed to it probably), but then why don't they play any other game with word of mouth that is not slop?

plus no one buys any games besides centralised server multiplayer games and those aren't cheap. most people literally pirate this slop (as well as all other games). even for consoles you can just pay someone to install games for you. on top of that most multiplayer games on pc are either peer to peer or server games with dev released or reverse engineered server executables. most of them don't even need steam anymore, an entire infrastructure and suite of software has been developed that makes this process as smooth as possible, free of charge or with minimal cost.