Valve wants to remake Artifact from scratch

Valve’s card game Artifact hasn’t been doing well since its launch in November 2018. The player count has dropped almost immediately, from a peak of more than 60,000 concurrent players, now down to just 200 Steam Charts). This is an amazing drop, especially for Valve.

Now, the company has admitted that things went wrong, and said they are reviewing the game to consider what to do next.

“When we launched Artifact, the team expected it to be the beginning of a long journey, building on years of development. Our plan then was to switch to a normal strategy, constantly rolling out updates by communicating with community members,” Valve’s Jeep Barnett wrote.

“Obviously, things didn’t go as expected. Artifact is the biggest difference in terms of a game where our expectations are completely different from what is actually happening, but we don’t think that players misunderstood our game, or that they were playing the wrong game. Artifact is now an opportunity for us to improve our capabilities and use that knowledge to make better games.”

Barnett said there are “deep-rooted” issues with Artifact that cannot be fixed by the strategy of updating with new features and cards. Instead, Valve believes they need to rethink everything, including “game design, economics, social experience at play, and more”. And that will take quite a while.

“From here on, we will focus on the bigger issues instead of just adding updates,” Barnett wrote. “While this testing and development process will take a long time, we are ready to take on this challenge and get back to you when the team is ready.”