Valve's Artifact Ended 2018 outside Steam's Top 100 Most-Played Games

Megalith

Megalith

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Judging by the digital collectible card game’s performance over the last month, Artifact may never recover unless Valve makes drastic changes to the title. Strong debut in November aside, Artifact has lost so many players that it can’t even break the top 100 rank, which is unusual for a product from a highly regarded developer. “Valve’s decision to try and monetize a $19.99 card game and ignore the demand to create sequels to their best-selling franchises Half-Life, Left 4 Dead, and Portal isn’t paying off for the popular publisher.” The title is currently ranked at 104 with 3,395 players.

Dota 2 and CS:GO have stayed at the top of Steam for years, but in just the past month, Artifact‘s player base has declined by so much that at times it ranks just outside of Steam’s top 100 most played games with only a few thousand concurrent players. Now, with the rise of Fortnite on the Epic Games Store and more triple-A developers pulling their games from Steam, Valve is in need of new games that can help Steam stay on top as the premier platform for PC gaming…unfortunately, based on the numbers, Artifact doesn’t look like it’s going to be it.
 
SecretStash said:
Is there anybody here who doesn't hope this continues to tank big-time, and Valve returns to there roots? Too much greed. They forgot where they came from.
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They completely and utterly have. They remade dota and then just stopped doing anything else
 
It takes them so long to make a damned game that this one was, what? Three, four years late to hop on the fad?
 
stelonous said:
It's almost as if they don't have IPs that will rake in millions... I wonder what those IPs are... The number "3" keeps popping into my head...
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They do have csgo and dota 2 as mentioned. Sure those keep them fat and lazy.
 
zerogg said:
It would be ironic if after all these years, it ends up being competition to steam that forces valve to release titles that the community wants, that are guaranteed to sell by the boatload.
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Why would that be ironic? Steam (and the ridiculously high profit, low risk revenue stream it brings) is the exact reason they stopped making games in the first place. Why take the chance developing Half Life 3, when you can just sit on your popular over-half-a-decade-old-games and take your cut of everyone else's risk?
 
With all the incoming competition hopefully Valve gets back to work on some of their better IPs. Of course a 3-4 year development cycle wouldn't help them in anyway.... announce to early and they get vaporwave fingers pointing. Although they do have a ton of money. Perhaps its time to round up a handful of the Valve hippies and put them to work on a fast track project... heck in Valve style start 3 games based on their IPs, and make it a contest team with the most exciting progress after 6 months gets a boost of money and resources so they can push their game out within 2 years of start so they can go back to being hippies. Other teams are forced to finish their games for the year after. lol

Valve probably should have always had a few game irons in the fire. So every time one of these other publishers started pounding their chests and launching their own services Valve could have dropped a must have Steam exclusive as a F U. Not that steam is in any trouble... just sometimes it would be nice to see them be a little ruthless with the competition instead of their players. Really a pay to install card game that is pay to play... shocking its doing terrible.
 
It wouldn't surprise me one bit if Valve are just testing to see what point of monitisation most players will bite at, with the revenue they have incoming they can afford to have a throw away title. With that said, having worked in the industry for years, I can almost guarantee that at least a few people will be losing their jobs over it.

Let's hope Valve see sense and make it freemium soon before it becomes irrelevant and refund the purchase price to everyone that bought it.
 
I've heard nothing but bad things, expensive things about this game. I heard to just get into the game costs around $180 or something. Lame.

Regardless of what the actually costs are, where there is smoke, there is fire and from what I've heard and read, there is plenty of smoke.
 
I doubt there are many people left in Valve who know how to make a good FPS. So the most likely scenario if they make HL3 is they'll invest a ton of money and it'll flop. I bet the new generation of gamers don't even know what Half Life is anyway, so their only market will be old people and their nostalgia.
 
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The things I have heard about working at Valve give me little hope that anything people actually want will come out of the company at any point. Almost sounds like Amazon corporate - no f-ing thanks.
 
benedict said:
I doubt there are many people left in Valve who know how to make a good FPS. So the most likely scenario if they make HL3 is they'll invest a ton of money and it'll flop. I bet the new generation of gamers don't even know what Half Life is anyway, so their only market will be old people and their nostalgia.
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Nintendo has made billions of the nostalgia market. The beautiful thing about catering to 'old people' is that they have money.
 
MTG:A ate their digital lunch its going to be hard since the paper crack 800lb gorilla actually makes a damn good digital representation of their game
 
Valve's problem is that Gabe has zero interest in what his customers actually want. Gabe is interested in Gabe, end of story.
 
I just wished Valve would license someone else to make a LFD3. If they are not willing to do it themselves, let another software group do it.
Walking Dead would have been great use of that LFD2 software engine.
 
Skiddywinks said:
Why would that be ironic? Steam (and the ridiculously high profit, low risk revenue stream it brings) is the exact reason they stopped making games in the first place. Why take the chance developing Half Life 3, when you can just sit on your popular over-half-a-decade-old-games and take your cut of everyone else's risk?
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Maybe not so much "it would be ironic" as "it would serve Valve right"...
 
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