Artifact hits new player low, loses 97% of its playerbase in under two months - Sensationalist Headlines

Its half life is one week. Seriously its player numbers were half the launch amount within a week of launch day. By comparison, Team Fortress 2 somehow managed to set a new all time player peak last month, meaning it's going stronger than ever after 10 years.

You might've forgotten the part where Ubisoft announced it to be online-only. Things aren't exactly looking up.

Oh come on, as much as I dislike the "treating something as post-mortem before it even releases" attitude myself, Ubisoft themselves have proudly admitted they'll be doing many of the things that people didn't want the game to turn into, all to fulfill their "live service" model. Sure, they could pull another Mario + Rabbids and the game turns out to kick ass despite all the doomsaying up to its release, but everything I've heard about the game recently just points to another Artifact-esque scenario of "Who (besides your undead stockholders) told you this was something that anyone wanted?"

The game's going to have some manner of multiplayer. The details besides that aren't known because the game is in early development and everything is subject to change. Michel Ancel is also a veteran director and game designer who's been given significant leeway over at Ubisoft because A. he's not part of the canadian teams and is one of the continental homeboys and B. he's been allowed to work on his pet/vanity project for like 10+ years despite the first one being far from a commercial success. Maybe let go of your cynicism if it's making you claim "things aren't looking up" based on some foggy details on a game we barely know anything about and that's so early in development its lead designer/director has no real clue when it is going to be ready for release.

the ARTIFACT is how many players are still interested in this POS My only hope is that this sends the right message rather then "Ooops! It looks like the Steam playerbase simply doesn't want any more games by us! So lets just keep resting on our laurels"

Yes

It's not just "some manner of multiplayer", they've explicitly said it'll have an always-online requirement.

Always-online games are not intrinsically evil.

Boreal Alyph looks more interesting honestly.

I'm more impressed this has any players

Maybe not, depending on the type of game. But as the follow-up installment to what was celebrated as a single-player experience, I'd argue that it's not a good look for this one. Nor with Ubi's recent shift in focus to the "live service" business model, even where such a model isn't necessary.

If they wanted to turn BGE2 into a yearly product they would have given it over to the canadian sweatshops instead of allowing Michel Ancel to run around with the concept for a decade to figure out how the game would even work.

Can't wait for the inevitable crowbcat video about this game's failure.

I actually remember being interested in this game, right up until they announced the pricing model. I mean, it's Richard motherfucking Garfield, PhD, deliberately setting out to make a game with more strategy (like Magic) but without all the rules baggage. If they fixed the pricing, I would probably pick it up. There is definitely a market for a premium zero-MT online CCG - pay $20 or hell, even $60 up front, get all the cards and play online as much as you want. Maybe charge $20 for the annual or biannual or sesquiannual expansion, but ditch the trading and random drops entirely, or limit it to just cosmetics if you absolutely must make some extra money.

Haha. They'll lay off everyone involved in Artifact and go back to counting piles of money for another half a decade.

Steam is always online.

Oh, I can just imagine how much worse Valve would get if it actually goes public.

I don't even know how this can function as a wake up call to Valve. It's sort of difficult to spin this as a failure of their management structure when this is much more obviously a failure to listen to their community

It won't be a wake-up call. "Infinite money printer in the basement", remember? Even with Artifact's colossal failure, they still have no reason to actually listen to their players so long as Steam is a thing and has a near-monopoly on the PC space.

this is great news for valve though it's a pre-existing, successful mod that they can take and slam an economy/pricetag/both into: the only thing that's stuck for them since 2009

Not in the same way. If your connection dies while playing a game then you can continue playing, you don't get kicked off. Steam Offline mode is also a thing which I have used when I had no internet. Worked fine.

The problem with Steam offline mode is it requires you start Steam online and then activate offline mode while you still have a connection, so if your internet or the servers go down you cannot activate offline mode, and if you do have the foresight to activate offline mode before your connection goes down then you will have to leave your computer on to keep access to Steam offline.

To be clear I meant that battleborn had about the same number of players at the same point in time - battleborn seems to be sitting at 20-30 players currently, which is probably just people launching the game by mistake.

I did not mean a yearly product, I mean an open world structure that facilitates microtransactions, as seen in the latest ass creed games.

or maybe its just the fact that it kind of sucks because nobody asked for it

If Artifact were an element, it'd be francium-223.

Did she own a red car that simply went faster than similar models?

This is what happens when you make a game with no audience, have a $20 paywall for it despite being a spinoff of a F2P game, and then have a paltry amount of content that you intend to continue to fund by way of trading card microtransactions out the ass. The new guys at Valve definitely have no understanding of their communities or fanbase anymore, and I hope this sends them scrambling into realizing that rather than more extreme measures.

No??? I've been using Steam since 2010, and pre-2018 I did not have a steady internet connection. I was *always* able to start Steam up in offline when I wasn't connected.

https://files.facepunch.com/forum/upload/58263/98f5a0a8-faf9-4dcd-840a-cb43937abae3/Annotation 2019-01-15 140506.png ????? That's after completely closing Steam and then starting it with no internet and I was able to go into offline mode with no issues.