Artifact designer Richard Garfield is among the Valve layoffs
48 replies, posted
https://www.artibuff.com/blog/2019-03-08-garfield-is-no-longer-at-valve
He was working with Valve as a contractor through his company Three Donkeys.
Statement from him:
We weren't surprised by the layoff considering how rocky the launch was, the team was enthusiastic about the game and were confident that they had a good product but it became clear it wasn't going to be easy to get the game to where we wanted it. The layoff makes sense for a number of reasons. To name a couple; now that the game is out there time is more critical, so more voices within the team that you have to navigate may not be as good as making less considered decisions faster. Another - the expertise that 3 donkeys brought is less critical after listening to us for 4+ years.
Both Skaff and I remain optimistic about the quality of the game and have offered our feedback and advice in an ongoing gratis capacity simply because we would like to see the game do as well as we think it can. We enjoyed working with Valve and I was impressed with their relentless focus on the quality of the game and experience being offered to the player.
https://youtu.be/1k_y2QmNet8
This is Garfield's modus operandi. Come in, start a game, let other people take it after that. That's why he's at a consulting company instead of a game dev shop - he either isn't good at, or more likely just doesn't like, following through on a game after initial release.
Of course, that doesn't mean Valve isn't slowly imploding on themselves, but this is weak evidence at best.
"we had a good product"
Look, i'm down for trying shit and all that, but you guys really ignored people.
Correct me if I am wrong, but didn't a lot of folk give negative feedback about Artifact?
https://twitter.com/PlayArtifact/status/1072350816332333056?s=20
Last update December 20, and after christmas no movable employee cubicle was in the artifact corner
"We're in this for the long haul." is probably the greatest line considering the fact that they have 2 players left
"We're in it for the long haul."
No one wanted this game. No one. The game wasn't the disappointment, Valve was.
It was so good that people played it for 5 minutes and left because it was too intense.
Makes me wonder if they are going to try and keep making this work or they are going to silently kill it off and act like it doesn't exist.
Conservationists are desperately trying to breed them to prevent extinction but it's not looking good
Artifact boggles my goddamn mind. I get the idea that if the game were announced in the midst of Valve actually giving a fuck about their other properties and releasing new entries for them, people wouldn't be as mad. Like, Valve puts out game after game of stuff we wanted and then decides to do something new to them and have some fun after everything, and we'd probably be more okay with it. Obviously there's still the chance that a lot of its inherent issues would have still been present, but I think its existence probably would have been more well-received if they had gone this route.
Except, that's obviously not the case. Valve instead decides to go completely silent on their old IPs for years, only focusing on their current multiplayer titles (and sometimes even those don't get the support they need), working on TONS of weird horseshit that makes us question if they're even a game developer anymore, and basically ignoring the community as a whole. They'll throw in the occasional "haha what comes after 2??" joke but by this point that joke has gotten extremely stale considering the state of everything.
I'm not sure what Valve was thinking would happen when they put this game out after the poor showmanship they've been displaying for years. Artifact's failure feels like a huge serving of karma for them, and honestly, they deserve every bit that's coming to them.
I think the biggest hint to not double down was everyone booing the reveal.
https://i.imgur.com/gDuQF3f.png
you are dead
not big surprise
Hey, it's an improvement from three days ago! (Courtesy of another user from the Artifact player count thread)
https://files.facepunch.com/forum/upload/134246/8d510486-eda9-4f55-a65f-1b2edc8d01f2/image.png
avoiding anything that they actually ought to have been doing.
Imagine being the company famous for making F2P a serious gaming concept and one with such a title under their belt that even today is still played by thousands and then just going and making a game designed to suck money from people in a way that is genuinely insulting.
All you had to do was make it free to play from the getgo. The single most obvious choice given the current market and your own prior experiences but no they just xd'd it and threw this shit.
For comparison right now:
https://files.facepunch.com/forum/upload/109898/7b0167b7-d026-4974-89b3-c6b26817d04e/20190308_183706.jpg
This is fucking stupid, I don't understand how valve can fuck up so badly.
You'd think as a company they'd focus on profitable IPs and understand their target audience, but that isn't what's happened, they've focused on what THEY can do and not what people want and the end result is that players hate it, it's completely understandable...
I still kinda feel sorry for the Artifact team since they really did want to make a good game, but it probably should have been the game after a new Half Life game rather than the first proper Valve game in yoinks.
A bad game is a bad game no matter when it's released. Don't feel bad for any of them, they tried to abuse your wallet.
Dota 2 is a very profitable IP. I know even Dota players don't care about the lore, but plenty of other companies did fine with PCG spinoffs of their existing franchises. The idea wasn't completely without merit - I actually venture to say that, for most companies, Artifact would have been a good idea.
There were two main problems Valve encountered, and one wasn't even with Artifact itself. The first problem, and the one I hope was the bigger, was the monetization - pay-to-pay-to-play is just too fucking greedy. Nobody's going to plop down that much money on a game without a thriving community, and doing it that way from launch meant they could never get that community. Look at TF2, it launched as a paid game, and only acquired lootboxes and UT later (and then went free-to-play anyways, to draw in more players to feed the beast). And they also did it while anti-monetization animus was higher than it's ever been - people hate lootboxes, and energy recharges, and microtransactions. There are governments getting involved, people are so mad. I did market research for my own game, and the second-best-polling pitch was "A game without microtransactions or lootboxes or energy timers, just pay money to buy the game and that's it". People are fucking tired of the bullshit - we want to just pay money once to buy a game, like we used to.
The other problem was that all the negative sentiment towards Valve finally had something to blow out on. It was going to do that regardless of what the game was. It could have been the next Portal (in the sense of "awesome new game nobody knew they wanted", not "Portal 3") and still gotten that level of hate. And I can't say Valve doesn't really deserve it. As a developer, they're basically dead - they only published CS:GO, not developed; Dota2 was a bought-up mod team (and was six years ago anyways). It's been eight years since the last full, non-tech-demo, Valve-made game, and they've been letting many previous online games wither on the vine. And as a platform owner, they've also been making nothing but mis-steps with Steam, which shouldn't really affect the public perception of them as a developer but does anyways.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NDKN_f6nq08&feature=youtu.be&t=6902
Timestamped, but what the fuck
What confuses me is that Valve is sitting on a treasure trove of market research data (Steam) and yet they chose literally the one thing that would make no money
Would Artifact have been a pretty decent game had it been Free to Play, or gone the Hearthstone Route? I feel like if it was F2P it would have taken off
Its because that's not his thing, not that he's not 'good' at it. Every set he's come back and helped develop for Magic: The Gathering has been an incredible success and consistently some of the most beloved sets of all time, even recently (original Innistrad and as of recently, Dominaria, one of the most impressive sets I have ever had the pleasure of playing).
Just wanted to clarify, he's still a bundle of pure talent, but he doesn't like being cooped up on one project for long.
'Artifact' Feels Doomed, And It Has Nothing To Do With Whether O..
Here's an interesting fobes article that was written when artifact's decline started to be more noticable, just before xmas.
Artifact has stripped so much bare about the transactional nature of games-as-service that it's made people deeply uncomfortable, and it's hard to imagine a way out right now. Artifact has doubled down on unpopular trends to the point where they define the game's messaging beyond its actual gameplay
It wasn't the fact it was a bad game itself that killed artifact (by all accounts it was pretty good) but valve's horrid monetisation of it that just put off everyone, plus their total lack of PR has made everyone lose total faith in the game. (For example Fallout 76, despite people shitting on it, has regular blog post updates and has shown a whole 1 year road map. Artifact had a single patch note.)
Valve's method operandi is what killed Artifact.
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