Artifact suddenly “resurrected the grave”, increased 1000% players after opening the door for free

Artifact created a surprise again.

As we reported, after more than 2 years since its launch in November 2018, the DOTA 2-inspired card game – Artifact has officially been discontinued. This is considered a move to “raise the white flag of surrender” of the father of Steam with the game considered the most unsuccessful in the history of the company. However, developer Valve announced that they will still maintain Artifact and give away this game for free to the Steam gaming community around the world.

Less than 24 hours after that announcement, Artifact is seeing a spike in player numbers, more than the number of players when the game was first released in 2018. The biggest problem Artifact has is the background. The dismal economy requires players to pay for each new card, but since the entire game is now free, many think Artifact will “rise” once again on Steam.

Players can also try Artifact 2.0, a beta that’s been in development for the past year or so. Called “Artifact Foundry,” the beta incorporates many of Valve’s new ideas for a card game that’s much better than the original. However, Artifact Foundry does not offer free cards to players. Gamers can still unlock all the cards in the Artifact Foundry through play.

Back at the time of its release in 2018, Artifact had a pretty good start when it received high praise from the gaming community and professionals. There was a time when the cards of this game were exchanged for high prices on the Steam app market. However, that is all Artifact can do.

As of February 2019, which is about 3 months since Artifact launched, the game began to show signs of going down. Artifact’s average monthly player count at this time only ranges from 500 to 600. This is an extremely bad number, even a disaster for a product released from Valve. Compared to the time of launch in November 2018 (60 thousand players), Artifact has lost 99% of the customer market share.

Despite the spike in player numbers, there are also negative reviews on Steam. Many players who purchased Artifact early on are expressing outrage and dismay when Valve decided to cancel plans to revive Artifact in the style of No Man’s Sky. “Cheat game”one user writes , while another “Can’t believe I wasted my money on this game”.