Despite being a new game from Valve, Artifact's players have already seemed to be abandoning the game in droves.

There was a lot of excitement last year for Artifact, Valve’s latest card game centered around the Dota universe, but in retrospect, that excitement seemed to be more for the novelty that Valve was creating an actual new game than anything else.

As we near the two month release anniversary for Artifact, the game’s player base has dropped off pretty drastically. As pointed out by Gaming Lyf and as seen on Steam Charts, Artifact is currently reaching concurrent player heights somewhere in the neighborhood of about 3,000 each day. As of this writing, the highest peak within the past 24-hours was 3,204 players. Comparing this to its all-time peak of 60,740 players, which happened near release, and it’s easy to see that Artifact’s audience is slowly leaving. Within the past 30 days alone, Artifact has seen its average player numbers drop by nearly 55%.

So what exactly is the problem with Artifact? Well, it’s likely a mix of different factors. For starters, it costs $19.99 to purchase whereas many other games in the genre are typically free-to-play. Additionally, the card game market has become somewhat oversaturated in recent years. Blizzard’s Hearthstone found itself a rather untapped audience when it first launched back in 2014, which is one of the contributing factors to why it became such a success. Since that time though, we’ve seen releases like Gwent, The Elder Scrolls: Legends, and so many others populate the market. It stands to reason that even with the backing of Valve, Artifact has just found itself in a very competitive field. Plus, the response on the game as a whole has been pretty mixed from those who even have played it.

So is Artifact already on its way to becoming a dead game? Well, it just depends. Plenty of other notable games from the past few years have gotten off to rough starts before later finding a consistent audience. Ubisoft’s Rainbow Six: Siege is perhaps the best example of this.

That said though, Valve certainly has a lot to do on their end to entice more people into not only picking up Artifact, but then sticking with it. Even though there is a new Valve game on the market in 2019, something many started to think they’d never see again, that novelty doesn’t mean much if, in the end, the product itself isn’t being well-received. It’ll be interesting to see how Valve tries to turn things around from here.

Posted: Jan 16, 2019 7:14 pm
Last Updated: Jan 16, 2019 7:14 pm
Related Forum: PC Gaming Forum

Source: https://www.dualshockers.com/valve-artifact-player-numbers/