Valve stops developing the most failed game in its calendar

Valve has surrendered.

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.

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.

Thus, after the glorious glories of Half-Life, Portal, Left 4 Dead, CS: GO and even DOTA 2, for the first time in history, a game produced by Valve has such a tragic ending. .

Up to this point, it can be said with certainty that Artifact is a complete failure. In the illustrious history of more than 20 years, perhaps this is a strong blow to Valve’s ambitions. They were too confident, too hasty to come up with a game that went completely against the development trend of the market. While the needs of today’s players are entertainment, fast, easy to understand, accessible, Artifact is doing the whole opposite. The game is not free, too complicated, confusing, lengthy and time consuming. Suffering from so many shortcomings, Artifact’s failure was inevitable.

To save the situation and save some face, Valve does not want to immediately kill Artifact. Instead, they switched the game from paid to free. Currently the game has 2 versions, Artifact Foundry and Artifact Foundry, which are 100% free on Steam. Those interested can download the game here.