• Valve's Artifact drops to below 1,000 players two months after release
    334 replies, posted
I'm still baffled that they charged for the base game at all, considering how well their free-to-play model has been working for the actual Dota2 game.
MMod just came out, it's the right time for it. https://files.facepunch.com/forum/upload/224422/3b17e10c-b6ad-462f-809e-f53aa75ff0ee/mmodpreview.webm
https://files.facepunch.com/forum/upload/657/3e4a7628-9799-42ed-8cd9-3284036d7915/image.png I never thought i'd see the day.
Do we really need new threads about Artifact's player count every week? All these threads are the same, and there's no one even reporting on this
Valve is indelibly tied to this forum and with such a titanic disaster such as Artifact, might as well have a few more laughs before Garry kills this forum.
Always remember: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OR4jPtrDCLo This a DOTA 2 event for DOTA 2 fans. Even they didn't even really want it.
I mean beyond having Dota characters Artifact has very little in common with Dota 2 as a game - and I doubt most people who play Dota care about the characters of all things. There are mostly superficial reasons why there should be a big overlap, and it's kinda like expecting Dota 2 fans to go buy Dota-themed chess.
And on top of that the Dota 2 playerbase is devoted. They play Dota 2 because the game they love is Dota 2. Dota 2 barely flinches in playercount whenever any new game comes out, because Dota players tend to be exclusively Dota players. Dota 2 players aren't looking for something different, they've got Dota. This is like offering Skyrim fans a make-your-own-mead kit because the guy on the cart mentions mead at the start of the game. Yeah maybe a few hundred or even a few thousand Skyrim fans will have an interest in brewing their own honey wine but literally nobody else will care.
you forgot barney, who still owes me a beer
The whole reason they would make a Dota-themed chess is that they would want Dota fans to go play it, otherwise they wouldn't have made it Dota themed.
Not to mention Breen who literally died for realz.
I mean, yeah? I'm just saying it might superficially look like a good plan, but in reality I think it might be a misread. But to be honest I think I might've just made a fool of myself, because apparently Dota themed chess is a thing - I mean I had seen "auto chess" on r/dota2, but I didn't realise it was actually dota themed chess (and pretty popular to boot).
A bit unrelated with OP: https://files.facepunch.com/forum/upload/134246/e3a347e8-850e-4e14-a6ef-7f3365eaa1ed/image.png Sorry but I don't believe on that all time peak. I'm not suggesting it has the same numbers of CS:S, but DOD:S was very popular in the past and had for sure way more than 3000 players. These numbers must have been generated since Steam started to track the time spent on games ( which for example, it shows for me in CS:S a number low of hours, 250h, when it was at least two times bigger, maybe even 1000h since I got 541h in TF2 ), which by then DOD:S fell into the shadow of Valve.
These numbers, if I recall, only started being tracked after TF2's release. DOD:S was already dead by that point, which is rather telling given that Artifact is even deader.
The charts seem to only go back to 2012.
Remember kids, there was a Half-Life project from 2013 to 2015 that got cancelled. Mostly because half the dev team thought their own engine was so bad they should move to Unreal. This company isn't the one that made Portal 2. Which is now closer to HL2's release date than today's date, by the way.
They just published an update that had this in the patch notes https://files.facepunch.com/forum/upload/237391/1c43deb6-bc26-4b4f-8445-30f5f1d304ad/image.png Artifact Patch
all 5 people playing it must be overjoyed
Gotta make that money back somehow.
The last time I checked there are so few devs from the Half-Life era still at Valve that I could count them on one hand. Valve is dead.
I've said this in a previous thread and yes, there are few half life era devs left at Valve, that doesn't mean they don't have talented and capable staff and aren't still capable of making something great. Artifact is a game no one wanted with internal systems seemingly made to drive away players. but the actual game itself has had a lot of work and care put into it.
I'm pretty sure they outsourced a lot of it. I refuse to believe the bean counters running Valve are capable of making anything decent.
I really like dota, but I find Artifact to be a complete travesty
Between Artifact and CSGO, it almost feels like a mercy that Valve hasn't touched DoD or Half-Life in a decade.
Whats wrong with csgo?
Why touch some old game where you cant make any money out of it???
While gameplay wise it's (debatably) really solid, it's the extreme monetization that every last bit of cosmetic item around it has that's a problem. The fact that the only way to get any of the cosmetics that are any more then just random chance basic spray paint require either gambling and opening one of their lootboxes, or just shelling out the cash on the market (or dubious third party markets), with some kinds of cosmetics (gloves and knives mainly) being so rare that you could buy their real life versions of the same items for over 10 times less at the very least in most cases. Now, yeah, it's DEBATABLY not as bad since it went free to play, but before then, the game was 20 bucks a pop. Now that's no 60 dollar price tag with 20 dollar single microtransactions, and a majority of the low to medium-high end stuff can be bought for less then 5 bucks each, but that still doesn't excuse a paid game having lootboxes that are insanely stacked against you. Also the whole gambling concerns and think of the children i lost my house because i couldn't stop gambling csgo skins bla bla blaaaa. Also, the majority of players who play the game that have had it from before then didn't even know that the game went free to play, most people I talked too in public games just assumed the loyalty badge you got for owning it before it went free was just some random gift from Valve because they felt like it, and almost all of them got mad when I told them this.
starts? they already are
In before Auto Chess gets more players than Artifact.
Just saw this on r/dota2: https://files.facepunch.com/forum/upload/185359/756b9bc9-6299-4e8c-82a5-ab8c0ec2891f/D9F13F1A-3D80-4B03-A298-490337E64981.png
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