Artifact has officially failed and even the developers want to go back to the drawing board to remake it. The genius behind the famous card game Magic: The Gathering has now commented on why Artifact went down the drain at all.
Who is Richard Garfield? Richard Garfield is the original creator of the (analog) trading card game Magic: The Gathering. Magic has existed in this form since 1993.
Garfield was also creatively involved in Artifact and was part of the development team. He was one of the reasons why many players had already suspected Artifact to be a potentially great success.
Why Artifact failed
These reasons are mentioned by Garfield: In an interview with win.gg, Garfield and his partner Skaff Elias talked about the fate of Artifact. From Garfield’s perspective, there were three reasons that condemned Artifact to failure:
- The funding model was not well received by the community
- There were too few activities for players, such as challenges or missions
- “Review bombs” that only criticized certain elements prevented the game from reaching certain players at all
Exactly these criticisms were also mentioned over time by the fans. Especially the payment model, in which one has to buy both the game and additional cards, was not well received compared to free competitors like Hearthstone and MTGA.
Was Artifact pay 2 win? In Artifact, new cards were obtained by purchasing booster packs, “Keeper’s Drafts” or on the Steam Marketplace and added to the collection. Even a complete collection could be purchased. It behaved similarly to a real trading card game.
For some players, this possibility of direct purchase sounded like “pay2win”. According to Garfield, however, this was not the case. There are two important points that make “pay2win”:
- The question of whether what you buy makes you the champion
- The amount of money that must flow at least to get what you want
Garfield compared the aspects to golf and Magic. One can spend “thousands” on golf clubs and still not be good. And compared to Magic, which is generally not considered pay2win, the acquisition costs for an Artifact deck are manageable.
What’s next for Artifact
After the social channels of Artifact have been silent for a long time and the last update came in January 2019, the developers recently admitted that Artifact has failed. They want to learn from the mistakes and make something better.
Since its release, Artifact has continued to lose players on Steam and viewers on Twitch, until it was hardly played and watched anymore. Only a hijacking by trolls briefly gave the Twitch channel a boost.
According to Garfield, however, Artifact has a good foundation to develop into a great game in the future. Currently, Valve is trying out a new project:
