97 karma · joined May 7, 2020
There are some things where AI voices absolutely ruin it, but it's not always a requirement for "emotions" to be felt in the speech we're listening to.
Valve isn't some small indie company. They're not massive in terms of employee size, as they're only in the hundreds, but remember they have some of the biggest gaming tech stacks, such as Steam in itself, but also games like CSGO, which is arguably still one of the biggest fps games. No doubt they run those things solely by themselves without contracting some of the work outside of the company.
It's still by far the fastest way to prototype for me and it works out of the box.
Valve has always been community centered and it really shows in how all their development tools are pretty much available such as mapping tools, server tools etc.
With CSGO most of the matchmaking isn't even done in official servers, but with third party organizations like Faceit. If you want to be a professional CSGO player then you can't even rely on official servers. Nobody can go pro by playing official only when it comes to CSGO, you literally have to use third party services and their community servers.