Valve’s Artifact Failed and is Now Free for Everyone

Valve’s own CCG, Artifact, based on the world of Dota 2 released in late 2018. It’s safe to say that the game absolutely bombed, with an all-time peak of about 60,000 players and less than 50% of all reviews on steam being positive, this game seems like it wasn’t destined for greatness like other games developed by Valve. Artifact received a lot of negative reviews from the start because the game’s monetization model was anything but consumer-friendly and the player base declined incredibly quickly.

Back in 2019, Valve admitted that Artifact had a lot of bigger issues that couldn’t be fixed with the normal type of update, and this resulted in complete silence for a good while after telling us that they would be focusing entirely on these issues. It was surprising to hear that they were still working on the game in 2020 when they brought the game over to its Artifact 2.0 beta-phase that lasted until just a few days ago. Last week, the decision to stop development on the game completely was made. The player base simply didn’t justify further development of the game.

The silver lining of this ordeal is that the latest versions of Artifact Valve released are now free for everyone to keep, with no micro-transactions to get more cards in-game and the marketplace-functionality taken completely out of the game. Both versions, now called Artifact Classic and Artifact Foundry are fully free now and you can get a detailed description of both versions here.

According to what I’ve heard since the news was made public, this decision was anything but unexpected by the people who actually played the game. I figure it’s similar to those people who bought into Anthem, which was recently also given the boot to focus on other projects actually worthwhile the time, effort, and money. Who knows, maybe Valve will put the Artifact-team to work on other games as well, and usually, we can count on the people at Valve knowing what they’re doing.