Valve’s Artifact is about to become just that
Artifact launched on November 28, 2018 with player activity reaching about 60.7 thousand. To put that into perspective, another of Valve’s titles Left 4 Dead 2 (you may have heard of it) reached a peak of 21.8 thousand players in its first month of activity in July of 2012. With almost a forty thousand player lead on one of Valve’s most beloved games in the past decade, one would think that Artifact could have a chance at longevity, right?
So when Thanos collected the Infinity Stones and snapped his fingers, he wiped out half of all life in the universe. Apparently, he walked into Valve, snapped, and wiped out 80% of Artifact’s players. Oof. Speaking to a more tangible number, that leaves Artifact’s player activity peaking at under twelve thousand players on its two week anniversary. So what could be the cause of such a short honeymoon for Artifact?
What does the online community have to say about faltering player activity?
In a monetisation analysis by pcgamesn.com, Artifact seems to ask quite a bit of its players, both in terms of time and money spent. And as far as CCGs games go, Artifact just doesn’t seem to have enough of its own unique attraction to take players away from other card games like Hearthstone. IGN posted a “review in progress” when the game launched. At the time, the review was generally positive, but it came back to Artifact not having its own two legs to stand on.
So, again, why play it if you’re already playing Hearthstone? Or anything else for that matter? Speaking of Hearthstone, since its release four years ago, it has reached 100 million registered players. How many of those players are active? That is another story.
It’s really a shame that Artifact has fallen so far, so fast. I’m not a CCG player, but from the gameplay I saw, there is a lot of Valve-tier polish, as well as detail and intricacies that people love to see in these games. No one really expects voice acting to be a noteworthy feature of a card game, but Artifact pulls it off with fully voiced card descriptions and other background dialogue.
Can Valve pull this one back from the brink? Does Artifact have what it takes to save itself from obscurity? Tune in next time- I mean, let us know what you think in the comments below!
Source: Youtube – The Know