Despite its release in late November, the once-promising Artifact digital card game is already on its way out. While early signs pointed to a smart design and thriving esports scene—due primarily to the reputation and statements made by the game’s developer—the game currently has fewer than a thousand daily active players. How does a game lose favor so quickly? And more importantly, what can be learned from the rapid decline of Artifact?
A Year of Artifact
Artifact had all the features that you would expect from an up-and-coming competitive title: a closed beta that includes pro players, several teams promising to join at launch, and a top developer with established esports experience—Valve Corporation.
As a publisher, Valve operates one of the largest gaming platforms in the world; digital distribution platform Steam claims 47M daily and 90M monthly users, respectively, and a catalog of over 30,000 games. Meanwhile, it also runs two successful esports: Counter-Strike: Global Offensive and Dota 2, which consistently features the highest prize pool across the industry.
So, when Valve announced a year ago that Artifact would have a $1M USD tournament in the first quarter of 2019, few were surprised. Things picked up speed over the summer when the game was first shown openly to the public at PAX West in Seattle, Washington. Media coverage was positive, including our own.
Credit: Valve
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Valve further increased excitement for the game by releasing two webcomics that tied the card game into Dota 2’s lore, and also gave all Artifact owners a free month-long subscription to Dota 2’s premium service, Dota Plus. The developer also held a $10K “preview tournament” in the weeks before launch.
Artifact launched on Nov. 28, 2018, and despite the hype, only saw a peak of 60K players in the first 24 hours—Dota 2, by comparison, regularly sees over 400K. According to SteamCharts, within a month that number had plummeted to less than 10K players a day, and by February had essentially flatlined to less than a thousand.
Along with its players, services for the game have disappeared, and it hasn’t been updated since late January. Legendary game designers Richard Garfield and Skaff Elias—both veterans of card game Magic: the Gathering—were laid off earlier this month. Almost every fan site has stopped posting updates.
News on the esports front is similarly dire. Teams are trimming their rosters significantly if not dissolving them altogether. There is only a single planned tournament in the game’s future, a $30K offline league set to take place in Bulgaria in early May. Valve’s promised $1M tournament is nowhere in sight.
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In fact, the only news coming from Valve is a single blog post from last week, vaguely stating a way forward that outlines long-term redesign.
“The correct course of action is to take larger steps, to re-examine the decisions we’ve made along the way regarding game design, the economy, the social experience of playing, and more… Moving forward, we’ll be heads-down focusing on addressing these larger issues instead of shipping updates.”
Unfortunately, that means little for the current players and guarantees that any potential newcomers will be waiting for big changes before picking the game up.
Why did this happen?
There are three main factors that contributed to Artifact failing to find traction: its business model, unanticipated rivals, and negative reviews.
Business Model:
Artifact’s business model, revealed over the summer, was a break from the norm in digital card games. Rather than going free-to-play, Valve opted for a mandatory $20 buy-in. In an interview with Valve’s founder and CEO Gabe Newell last November, PC Gamer asked him why he decided to go this route:
Credit: Valve
“If time is free, or an account is free, or cards are free,” explained Newell, “then anything that has a mathematical relationship to those things ends up becoming devalued over time, whether it’s the player’s time and you just make people grind for thousands of hours for minor, trivial improvements, or the asset values of the cards, or whatever.”
To an extent, other developers have come to that conclusion as well. When Blizzard Entertainment released Overwatch in 2016, it also opted for a paid model. The model worked—the game has over 40 million players.
Still, consumers may not be as accepting in a paid digital CCG. Overwatch is an action-driven shooter with lots of content out of the box, including every hero available to play. Artifact, in comparison, comes with just 228 cards out of the box. A full collection requires several hundreds more cards, which can only be obtained through in-game purchases.
Perhaps the biggest problem with the model is that it breaks from all of Valve’s other top competitive titles. Dota 2, the game Artifact draws its theme/inspiration from, is and has always been completely free. Counter-Strike: Global Offensive did have an up-front cost—but went free-to-play last December, forming an awkward comparison to the just-released Artifact.
Unanticipated Rivals:
Another contributing factor is the release of two unanticipated rivals: Magic: the Gathering Arena and Dota Auto Chess.
Credit: Drodo Studio
Arena, as a game, was easy to anticipate. It was first announced in 2017 and entered open beta last September. What wasn’t anticipated, however, was the high praise the game received. As the latest in a long line of games attempting to bring Magic to a virtual tabletop, many expected it to fall flat as had the previous dozen.
However, Arena seems to have finally cracked the code, and was highlighted by many as a top up-and-coming esport—we gave it the #1 spot on our list of rising esports for 2019. Ironically, the game just completed its own $1M tournament, with several more on the way this year.
More surprisingly, though, is a game nobody expected. Dota Auto Chess is a custom game built within Dota 2 by a Chinese development firm, Big Drodo Studio. Released on Jan. 4, the game quickly grew. Currently, it has close to 7M subscribers, and recently announced a partnership with ImbaTV and Long Mobile to create a standalone mobile game featuring the same gameplay. In February, ImbaTV and Chinese streaming platform Douyu hosted one of the game’s first tournaments, and several outlets have reported that the same companies are planning an Auto Chess esports league.
Dota Auto Chess hurts Artifact in a number of ways. Firstly, it’s free and easily accessible through Steam. Being built in the same engine as Dota 2 and Artifact, it also looks similar and features many of the same characters. And while Dota Auto Chess isn’t a card game, as a strategic custom game built for speedy gameplay, it hits a lot of the same play elements as Artifact. For these reasons, it appears that Dota Auto Chess directly pulled from Artifact’s playerbase at a critical time in the latter game’s release.
Negative Reviews:
The final factor bringing down Artifact is the many negative reviews that the game received at release. To date, the game has almost 20,000 reviews on Steam, with the majority being negative. Even positive ones point out the game’s main drawback as outlined above—the business model.
Credit: Wizards of the Coast
The core problem is that Artifact was built from the ground up to allow players to buy and sell cards from each other, using the Steam marketplace. This is intentionally a mimicry of physical collectible card games, where a long custom has been to buy from and sell to friends or even a local shop. What Artifact doesn’t allow is the simple trading of cards, another physical custom that is favored among more casual players—get rid of what you don’t want, and get the cards you do.
Technically, you could get the same result on Artifact by selling your useless cards and buying the ones you need with your earnings—but that’s where players started to dislike the game. Once you cross the line of assigning a cash value to your cards, and especially when you need to do so to complete a deck and play in your own style, players started seeing themselves as vendors. Cards became a commodity, and each change to a collection came with a cost.
Making things even worse was Valve’s surcharge on every transaction, skimming profits with each sale. With no way to trade cards at a local store as you would in person with physical collectible cards, and no way to get cards for free as you can in almost every other digital card game, Artifact’s players had basically two choices: enjoy the fantastic gameplay with significant added costs and burdens, or leave and play something else.
Unfortunately for Valve, almost every Artifact player has chosen the latter.
Credit: Valve
Takeaways
While Artifact’s future remains in flux and Valve promises a long-term overhaul, the current version of the game is a clear lesson to all in esports. Business models matter, rivals can come from nowhere, and players really do care how they interact with each other and the game beyond just the gameplay. Even for large, experienced developers, declaring a game as the “new big esport” in no way guarantees that outcome.
Furthermore, esports teams and tournaments throwing themselves behind such promises can have painful results. Before committing, organizations should make sure they understand the game they are planning to support. More importantly, they should know how the game will be received by players—and that means the whole game, not just the gameplay.
Bottom line: a game needs players. An esport needs a lot of them.
