The failure that is Valve’s Artifact has finally hit a point where the creators over the new project have acknowledged the card trading game “has deep rooted-issues.” However, Valve plans to keep their heads down while working on Artifact, which means significant updates won’t come anytime soon.
Die-hard Artifact fans will try to make any excuse there is as to why the card game failed, but there is no denying that Valve’s DOTA 2 based-game is something that a majority of people do not find interesting — as evidence with the reaction at the International 2017 event.
Moreover, to make things worse, a $20 buy-in fee is required that shunned off potential players such as Reddit user WarFuzz:
“They released a TCG where the only way (For the most part) to expand your collection is by spending more money in a market where every Digital TCG is spend money or play on top of a $20 buy in
I was going to get Artifact on launch until I learned the above and noped out. I honestly dont know how they didnt see this coming. Artifact to me was the TCG version of Evolve. The “We built this game as a platform to sell DLC” Evolve.”
Acting as a counterpoint to the above take, although subjective in his point, another user by the name of Mad_Maddin had this to say:
“I repeat this again and again, this is not the problem of the game. If this was an actual problem, it wouldn’t have had as many players in the beginning. The point on how the card market works is actually a selling point to a lot of players.
The problem is that it is simply a bad game. Nothing more, nothing less, the game is no fun to play.”
Whether or not you think Artifact is boring, fun, or has other problems, there is no denying that the game is fairing poorly.
As a matter of fact, the late part of last year (December 7th, 2018) vpesports.com reported how Artifact had a low of 9,528 players, which was later followed by another write-up published in 2019. Additionally, the 2019 report revealed a low count of 1,639 players, a number that’s triple the current user base.
As it stands now, the trading card game not only continues to do worse by the weeks, the game has reached a new low of peak daily players that amount to 400. The same publication site stressed in a February report how Artifact isn’t even stabilizing, which isn’t a good sign.
To confirm all of the aforementioned points, Valve’s JohnM recently wrote up a letter explaining that Artifact has basically failed and “has deep rooted-issues” that will take a long time to fix:
“When we launched Artifact, we expected it would be the beginning of a long journey, that it would lay the foundation for years to come. Our plan was to immediately dive into our normal strategy of shipping a series of updates driven by the dialogue community members were having with each other and with us.
Obviously, things didn’t turn out how we hoped. Artifact represents the largest discrepancy between our expectations for how one of our games would be received and the actual outcome. But we don’t think that players misunderstand our game, or that they’re playing it wrong. Artifact now represents an opportunity for us to improve our craft and use that knowledge to build better games.
Since launch, we’ve been looking carefully at how players interact with the game as well as gathering feedback. It has become clear that there are deep-rooted issues with the game and that our original update strategy of releasing new features and cards would be insufficient to address them. Instead, we believe the correct course of action is to take larger steps, to re-examine the decisions we’ve made along the way regarding game design, the economy, the social experience of playing, and more.
So what does this mean?
Moving forward, we’ll be heads-down focusing on addressing these larger issues instead of shipping updates. While we expect this process of experimentation and development to take a significant amount of time, we’re excited to tackle this challenge and will get back to you as soon as we are ready.”
Personally, I don’t see how Valve didn’t see this coming, but I guess they thought, “Hey! Slap Valve and DOTA 2 on Artifact, and the $20 card game will be a success!” The initial crowd reaction to Artifact and significant player drop at launch is not only consistent that interest in this game is low, but it also matches up with Artifact’s Steam Recent Reviews and All Reviews:
With all of that said, sometime in the future, Valve and team will have their heads-down focusing on addressing issues plaguing Artifact instead of shipping updates. When that happens, only Valve the company knows the answer to that question.
