Artifact has lost over half its active playerbase in a week
113 replies, posted
http://vpesports.com/more-esports/artifact-losing-half-its-player-base
Valve’s digital card game Artifact is not enjoying a good start. Mere one week after its official launch, the game has lost half its active player base, and the numbers keep dropping.
The stats come from a number of Steam data tracking sites, including Steam Charts and SteamDB. According to both, Artifact peaked at just over 60,000 on launch day but has been
oozing players since. Every day, the game experience a new, lower peak, the one from Dec. 6 being at the humble 25,000.
The decline in numbers matches the worrying trends of Artifact tournament viewership too. So far, the game had two televised tournaments: The Artifact Preview Tournament by
Beyond the Summit; and the Mighty Triad: Strength by WePlay. Both events had high peaks early in their broadcast, but quickly lost viewership as they progressed. Combined, the
interested in these tournaments hovered somewhere between 15,000 and 25,000 viewers on average.
Although gameplay-wise, Artifact is a well-designed and thought out experience, one can understand why it’s struggling to retain players. Unlike its competitors, Artifact is “locked”
behind a $20 purchase cost and there’s not much to do in it after you’ve bought in. Valve’s product still offers the best cards-for-cash exchange rates compared to the competition, but
the game lacks any sort of progression system or ways to grind cards and packs in-game. The expert play modes, which are the ones giving rewards, are all locked behind $1 event
tickets — so pretty much a “pay for everything” model, as far as community’s perception went.
Although Artifact has been enjoying a loyal fanbase among pros and personalities and Valve have been quick to address some of the community’s concerns, the game evidently needs
more support still. A $1 million tournament will come for Artifact in 2019, but that already puts it on the lowest position among its primary competitors. On Nov. 29, Blizzard announced
their $4 million Hearthstone circuit for 2019. Last night, Wizards of the Coast upped the ante, for Magic The Gathering esports, including streaming and playing contracts for its
professionals.
What the fuck were Valve expecting, honestly. They’ve completely lost the plot. If it weren’t for Steam, Valve and their bullshit would have died over 5 years ago
Insulation.
Insulation never changes.
If it were Free to Play, they may be onto something with a few minor additions. I can't blame Valve for sitting on a mountain of cash and doing a project that they just might want to do rather than be beholden to whether or not what they do succeeds or fails, but their pricing is way out of wack here
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zpG1Ywmbioc
Valve isn't even fucking advertising the game. They bought actual TV ads for Portal 2, what happened?
To give an alternate view point on this, I am a dirty filthy card game player and really, really like this game.
I haven't spent any money (used steam credit, sold cards for >$20 on opening starter card packs, net positive) and can play it all the time for free. This can *not* be said about other games of this genre, you go into it expecting to pay a lot of money to keep playing.
The game itself is vastly different than the other Digital CCGs. It is way more of a strategy/board game than it is a card game.
The way acquiring cards works is very different than other digital games (See: Hearthstone). Any game that allows trading at all (or selling of your cards) is an incredibly different economy. I would be happy to go into the explanation on this.
All in all, I'm really happy with the game, and my friends who also play CCGs also really like it.
Other than "Hooray! Artifact is dead, we won!", does this post actually have a _reason_ that Artifact has less players?
Because the game lacks anything to keep people playing besides the game being fun. It's a shame but games need that sort of thing.
They realised they don't need to spend a single penny to make a fortune. Gabe's tax on the steam store and community market makes him more than enough money.
Like most games that are microtransaction heavy, Valve probably doesn't care if they only get a fifth of the audience if they're all whales paying five times as much.
Time to go free to play!
Did you try reading the article? Its right there in the third paragraph.
Yeah, because of this part in particular:
(used steam credit, sold cards for >$20 on opening starter card packs, net positive)
Your experience is not the norm. Your experience, almost by definition, cannot be the norm. Already Artifact's card flipping market has tanked in value compared to it's Day 1 market, with prices crashing by almost half-again today now that first-wave players without Steamguard are finally exiting the authentication period.
Even if the game has a "better" dollar value for card return compared to it's competitors, it certainly doesn't feel particularly cheap or friendly. It's monetized out of the whazoo. People would rather spend 100 hours running on a free-but-enjoyable-treadmill for their reward than vomit an additional "pay to play" price on a game they already bought. No matter how you justify the up-front 20$ pricetag, it is a 20$ price tag. A buy in. Full stop.
I also want to know exactly what cards you got with all of that money you apparently made by card sharking. Do you exclusively play Free Phantom Draft or something? Because Expert Draft and Expert Constructed have buy ins. Which is just another pay-wall for players in Artifact.
As I said in another post, yeah, the actual game of Artifact is fun. (My husband owns a copy.) However, the game of Artifact is hidden behind the least consumer friendly monetization I've seen to date, which masquerades as being consumer friendly because "something something free market." That's without pointing out that there's no actually card trading. So if I want to loan say, my spare Axe to my friend, then well, no. Pay Uncle Gabe the card tax to resell it on the market. Remember there's a 15% usage fee too!
So to your question in point:
You've got a fairly difficult, extremely heavily monetized card game with multiple up front barriers to entry, as well as recurring costs.
How would you expect to retain players? Especially when you're competing against much more well established, easily learned games.
That's not touching Artifact's growing balance problems. It doesn't feel good to lose to a deck with Axe in it, and see that Axe costs 10$ to straight up get from the marketplace (when he's low. He's ranged between 25$, more than the game itself, and I think 8$ at his lowest.) That is a pay2win function. Full stop, not fun, not engaging. Or you could open a theoretically infinite number of packs until you draw Axe. Again, not fun. Just because it's how it's been done before isn't a good justification, and it's a worse justification when Valve was promising that Artifact would really change things up in multiple ways.
Valve has also foresworn that they won't rebalance the cards for in-game economic reasons. So players who are dissatisfied with the current state of the game can't even hang on with the hope of a change in course. Valve literally took the worst of both the digital and physical card game market and mashed them in to a shared design philosophy, beyond all possible expectation. This has scared off plenty of players who were hoping for a well-balanced, easily accessible game.
All in all, Valve has designed a game specifically to encourage gambling and reward the most immense whales that it can. It's user unfriendly from multiple angles, and the community it is retaining are doing nothing to convince casual passers-by that it will get better, since they simply advocate the gospel of spend-more-noob.
Oh, also, Valve made the killer choice of lobotomizing many of the game's features on launch, including stripping out the in-game chat system, so if you happen to be an Internet Toughguy who likes trash talking over a hand of cards, well there's nothing in Artifact for that guy either. Why they did this, I cannot really fathom.
wait, half?
it started with only 40k players? that's preeeetty low for a VALVe game.
Oh shit I had the same thing happen. I legit thought that was artifact until the end slide.
I just noticed that those are all basically the big "PC" developers... What's happening?
Magic TG Arena is straight up F2P and doesn't charge cash to play, only if you want to buy packs faster than their drip-feed earning structure or you want to run draft tournaments. Arena even gives you rarity-keyed wildcard cards in their boosters, so you can choose the card (of the appropriate rarity) you want.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IsS_VMzY10I
When there was no applause at the game's announcement, I saw it coming a mile away. No matter how good your core gameplay is, everything surrounding it has to make it worth a damn, and no one asked for or wanted it.
Man, more people are playing Paladins than Artifact.
Wooph.
I've never even heard of this.
Also Rimworld is beating it, lmfao.
https://files.facepunch.com/forum/upload/237016/25850596-4c17-4a34-b2cf-f1d68c09f923/image.png
Dear Valve staff:
Give us Half-Life 3 and stop this P2W bullshit, you cunts.
I've never played a digital card game, and I never intend to, but I'm pretty certain this game is not going to be able to support the many expansions they undoubtedly have planned if it has barely 20000 active players a day. And that's IF it manages to hold onto those numbers. Plus, their business model was blatantly built on the most OP cards being expensive as hell on the steam market.
The entire thing is a giant house of cards that is falling in on itself, because not a single damn person working on this game apparently stopped to think about what would happen if the game wasn't a big hit. Clearly they've been sniffing each others farts for so long the assumed because the game was made by them, that it would automatically be successful - because they think their fanbase is made of brainlets who blindly worship at the altar of Lord Gaben. But not even the Dota 2 fans were apparently as stupid as they thought, so now Valve is suffering the consequences of their hubris and greed.
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