4:52
>This was not a soulless cash grab.
Uhh.. That's exactly why the game is (deservedly) fucking dead. As usual, VNN looking at reality through rose tinted nostalgia goggles.
The announcement did nothing but invite all forms of straw man and reigniting distaste for the game.
They were right to remain silent. Most in the know already knew that the current version is being abandoned for a new one.
You knew it was going to be a failure when the audience for the original announcement trailer were so incredibly disappointed with an audible 'awh...'
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n_GcXaXsmOU
Fans didn't want it no matter what the execution was.
The thought process for Artifact seemed to just be "Hey, Hearthstone, Duel Links, and MTG make a buttload of money for how much time and capital they put in to it, we can do the same!"
I really want to know why Valve thought it was a good idea to go up against Hearthstone with an even worse pay model. Did they think the Dota IP alone was gonna be enough to have people be down with it? Not even most Dota fans wanted it.
They really should just pull a Ricochet with this game and never talk about it again. Let it fade away into memory, and maybe have a good game come out afterward to restore the faith. Maybe a good single player game, which is what their hardcore fans have been clamoring for since after Portal 2.
I think they took their name and audience for granted, yes. They announced a logo and afterwards every info was from either pro streamers, blog posts or Gabe's "HL2 of card games" .ppt presentation. They didn't bother to explain to their target audience why they should be excited about this game or what exactly it is in the first place.
It's interesting you mention Ricochet. This was their first original competitive game since that and did just as well. Pretty telling.
Btw their Battle Royale version in CS didn't do too hot either afaik.
The people who made it made it because they were passionate about it and created a team, thats how it works there. Also the gameplay was apparently great. Thats what he meant by its not a souless cash grab.
Probably bootlicking so he doesn't lose his contacts or whatever
In his streams he has talked extensively on why he didn't find it a cash grab as someone who played the shit out of it and researched it. He has reasons.
Making CS:GO free and adding a BR mode resulted in the same amount of average players as its had since 2015. Likewise Left 4 Dead 2 has had around the same amount of monthly players since 2014.
Dota 2 itself is far past its peak and hitting a shoulder phase, slightly propped up by the popularity of autochess.
Artifact is outside the skillset of Valve development, Unlike all of the titles developed previously its a 1v1 game in a genre they have never made games for. No amount of polish and art can overcome a
lack of vision. Striving to make it like dota 2 with lanes and creeps and heros makes sense on paper, however when playing dota 2 you only control a single character and are 1/5 of any success and
failure. Artifact is more comparable to playing Dota 2 as if it were a real time strategy game like Starcraft 2 which is where the vision breaks down. Complexity isn't inherently a negative thing where CCG are concerned but its designed for a very narrow scope of people.
Even asking a mere $20 for the game will instantly cause people to really think hard about what they are getting into. Being free might have lead to a different outcome than what we have now however
since they didn't want to anger people who bought into it (or refund the money) early they were stuck.
My friends who played artifact when it had people said they vastly preferred the monetization of Artifact to Hearthstone, because it was ultimately cheaper and less annoying/time consuming to deal with being able to just buy the cards you wanted than have to gamble for both purchases and the grind. Personally, while I haven't played Artifact, I do detest bullshit "muh progression" grinds instead of having free/easy access to all gameplay content from the get go. They also said the draft mode was the most played mode, and you got cards out of it a lot, so it wasn't as much of a problem at all.
I don't care what his reasons are; they will utterly fail to hold up to scrutiny. One has only to look at any one of several different aspects of the revenue to declare this game a cash grab rivaled only by korean pay to win shitfests.
>But it wasn't that expensive to buy all the cards
Yeah and they had plans on releasing many sets of cards, which you were required to pay real money for on top of a buy in for the game, and you had pay to play formats.
This game was and is a top to bottom cash grab, and no amount of apologist propoganda will ever change that.
If you look at how and why it was developed you will see it was really more a case of a disconnected developer than a cash grab.
The problem is the game is so cheap because nobody's playing it. At release, when people actually were playing the game, Axe was on the market for like 15$. Who's to say how expensive putting a good deck together would be if there was any demand?
They said that even with that in consideration though, they hated hearthstone grind and RNG that much.
I totally get that, and if you aren't playing T1 decks, im sure artifact would always be waaaaay cheaper
it's just, if I need to get a card like Baku in HS, it's no more expensive to craft than any other legendary, and I can dust all my old crappy cards to get it
if I need a card like Axe in Artifact, I can't really sell all my old stuff cause that deck is shitty now and no one wants the cards, so I basically just need to get out my wallet
hearthstone has its own problems with the continued nerfing of the classic set making it really hard to keep up while being FTP but that's a whole other issue
Sure they were disconnected. They were disconnected enough to believe that people would eat up a cash grab game if they stapled the dota/valve brand names to it. They were wrong.
Their detachment from reality doesn't change the fact that it was an absolutely blatant cash grab.
The main problem for most will always be the monetization. $20 up front, plus having to buy additional cards with ONLY actual cash does not work in the market Valve was aiming this game for.
If it was an actual physical card game, sure. Shit works for Magic, and I don't see how it wouldn't work for that audience.
Being sold as a video game though? No. Gaming audiences want to have the option to earn things in the game by playing the game. Even if the grind is tedious as fuck, there has to be an option present. If there's no option, then there's no interest. The only real exception to this would be if buying the game got you all the content for the game at that time.
If Artifact launched as a "$20 gets you every card in the first season with expansion purchases for later seasons" or "free to play with a grind or purchase options", Artifact would probably have a decent amount of players right now. Having to buy the game, and then having to spend money again almost immediately is a major turn off. It results in a game that feels almost incomplete and scummy.
Honestly, I can appreciate them admitting this game did poorly and that they want to fix it, but frankly it sounds like they're still going about it all wrong. The Valve community does not want Artifact, they want to see Artifact die, they do not want to see Artifact improve. Frankly quite a lot of the Valve community just don't want a virtual card game at all, and as someone who's not in the virtual card game community I can't say with any authority what they want. It really feels like it would be in their best interests to cut their losses, a major revamp is not going to save this game, in fact it seems like that would just kill the interest its less than 300 players still have for it.
So why the hell are there so many people working at Valve now that would rather pour months into revamping a greedy-ass digital card game after the first version bombed, rather than making the kind of revolutionary games Valve used to be known for?
trying hard to be a gound breaker for things nobody asked for
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