Valve’s CEO, Gabe Newell, admitted that their game “Artifact” was a major flop. However, they want to revive the online strategy game. The overhaul is so extensive that internally they are referring to it as “Artifact 2.” Will it finally become the long-awaited Steam hit?
What’s the deal with Artifact? Normally, all multiplayer games from Valve are major hits on their platform Steam: Dota 2; CS:GO, even the old Team Fortress 2 have been top performers on the giant PC platform for years.
The online collectible card game Artifact was released in November 2018 and there were indications that it would be the next mega-seller. The game started with massive interest on Steam. It was under the motto: “Valve is finally making games again!” Because Artifact (2018) was Valve’s first game since Dota 2 (2013).
But Artifact crashed on Steam like a shot-down bird from the sky and hit the hard ground of the Steam charts.
The highly anticipated “new game from Valve” turned out to be a flop that hardly anyone wanted to play after a short time.
The digital card game was released in November 2018 and was virtually dead by February 2019.
In March 2019, Valve stated, that they want to “address the fundamental issues of the game,” but there has not been much information about it in the past year.
Valve plans reboot for Artifact
What Valve says now: Valve’s CEO, Gabe Newell, is somewhat of a “Jesus of PC gaming.” He stated in an interview with EDGE magazine that they have learned a lot from the release of Artifact on Steam and will apply these lessons in a reboot.
They were disappointed with how Artifact performed. In another interview with IGN, it was mentioned that Artifact was a huge disappointment.
At Valve, they thought they had a strong product but then achieved poor results. Now they want to see if they learned the right lessons from the failure.
Newell states that they have a major reboot planned for Artifact to justify its existence to customers and to the market. The reboot has become so extensive that they are internally referring to it as “Artifact 2.”
However, there are no further details yet on how Valve will revise the game.
Valve finally made a new game, but it had so many issues
Why did Artifact fail? The list of criticisms against Artifact was long and surprisingly varied:
- There were constant complaints about missing game content
- the element of chance was too high for some
- moreover, Artifact was relatively complicated and hard to “read,” players needed to invest time to understand what was happening in the game.
- There was also criticism of the payment model, some believed Artifact was “Pay2Win.” This led to a significant drop in card prices.
- Artifact suffered from review-bombing on Steam, which burdened it early on.
Ultimately, Artifact demonstrated a typical problem of online games: If the mood at release is poor, many players won’t even start the game, and others who briefly try it are quickly gone. This creates no player attachment. There is a lack of a healthy base of core players, which leads to a downward spiral that kills the game early.
Many online games on Steam face this issue, but it seems that Valve now wants to change the fact that they have such a flop in gaming history.
There are several games that have tried to turn things around with a reboot after a flop start. We have looked at MeinMMO at 7 games that wanted a second chance: Who succeeded and who failed?
