• Valve's Artifact drops to below 1,000 players two months after release
    334 replies, posted
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But that's the thing. You're not some random developer that does random things all the time. We're not talking about Bioware that suddenly axes Mass Effect and goes towards Anthem, or whatever. We're talking about a specific company that has a specific fanbase that likes specific games. Blizzard is yet another perfect example. Why did they never think Diablo Immortals would gather a shitload of backlash is beyond me. Not even gonna talk about the passive aggressive taunt they did with the whole "don't you have smartphones?" thing, but its fucking obvious you're gonna get in trouble when you peddle a mobile game, the thing most oldschool/diehard gamers despise with good reason, which is a big part of your audience, instead of teasing the game they have wanted ever since the prequel went to shit. Valve is the exact same thing. As a developer, you're sitting on a couple of successful franchises, with hardcore fans behind them, many of which have modded them back and forth, who constantly say the same damn things: give us a true sequel for half life/L4D/whatever. Maybe thats me, thinking through the optimistic developer's eyes that doesn't thinks about shareholders and printing money from 64x64 ppi files, but giving the fans what they want would be a good idea. Won't even say the best, but yeah, it sounds like a good idea, with the whole "demand market...whatever" thing. Despite that, Valve still went with one of the most niche ideas as you said, which also requires microtransactions, something that no one ever asked for, and that the unfamiliar name alone would instantly tell fans "yeah this is NOT what you want, but here it is anyway". The fact that nobody asked for it is bad enough, when you're a developer with franchises that people want. It's no wonder people are gonna react badly.
i think the reason that a lot of people saw it as a cash grab, was because it was "the dota 2 card game" - like, if valve announced they were just working on a card game, completely fresh IP, i possibly would have given it more leeway but instead it was connected to the dota 2 universe. a part of hearthstone which people don't tend to appreciate is that the warcraft universe was adored, and blizzard had an absolute goldmine of characters, spells and lore to draw from to make it in contrast, dota 2's lore is a complete joke, so even the story part (which valve used to be decent at) fucking blows
this truly was the ricochet 2
I don't like the idea of game studios being pigeonholed into certain genres like that. Good devs make good games, even if they aren't the same as their old ones. Croteam makes Serious Sam and The Talos Principle. Retro Studio makes Metroid Prime and Donkey Kong Country. Monolith makes F.E.A.R. and Shadow of Mordor. Blizzard has an ARPG, an MMORPG, an RTS, a hero shooter, and a card game. Even Valve isn't strictly a shooter studio - Dota 2 is a completely different game from Portal which is a completely different game from Half-Life, Counter-Strike, and Team Fortress. I was actually pretty hype for Artifact. I'm a big TCG player, especially Magic - and they were presenting it as a game taking the strategic depth of Magic, without the decades of cruft and over-complicated early rules. If they had a reasonable monetization scheme - "pay $60, here's an infinite number of every card and as many matches as you want to play" or "here's the game and some prebuilt decks, you get a drop after every game and a pack is $1" - I'd absolutely have played it. But the monetization is what killed it. They got way, way too greedy - and just on principle, even though I got a free copy of the game somehow, I'm refusing to play. Not that there'd really be any point now, with nobody else playing. I'm not even 100% opposed to ut or random drops, just not to this sort of extent. Having to pay for a game, then pay more just to actually be able to play, then yet more to be competitive... no. That's like five steps too far. I think the people who hated the game for not being Half-Life 3 are kind of assholes. If you don't want to play a TCG, don't play it, but don't get mad at Valve for making a game that wasn't exactly what you wanted. If Valve listens to these people, it's going to ruin them - they'll slam out a Half-Life 3, but it'll be crammed full of microtransactions and lootboxes. I'd rather have good games that aren't exploitatively monetized, even if we never get a Half-Life resolution.
But it's not, you have to buy it.
tbh I think if I could've gone back in time and told my younger self to take all the money I was going to spend on Magic and spend it all on weed instead, I'd have probably had more fun experiences and I'd have been considered less of a nerd. On the other hand at 14 I could open a pack of magic cards in front of my mom.
the hero backstories are just random they serve literaly no purpose other than give the character the least bit of personality for the voice lines to feel real, kind of like OW except with less "oh right turns out this character is gay aswell" decisions after like 2 years of being released I mean, Dota 2's characters are straight up discount store Blizzard characters, mainly because Blizzard didn't want someone else to use their own property and figured it would be useful sooner or later, hence why we have wraith king, because a skeleton king is solely a Blizzard thing... Then again, nobody cares about the stories. Although the new hero Mars looks like shit tbh.
Game should have been free, as shitty as the Microtransactions were it wouldn't have been quite as bitter a pill to swallow if you also didn't need to pay an entry fee on top of that. Honestly I can't help feel a little pity for them, yes no one wanted this and parts of it are shit, people a lot of people clearly worked very hard on Artifact and seeing it not only fail to get an audience, but also utterly get destroyed and discarded in a matter of weeks must be a terrible feeling for a game dev.
Ironically, Garfield's original classic TCG, Magic, no longer ties rarity strictly to power level, but rather to complexity and power in draft/sealed (Garfield is only occasionally involved these days - he comes on every five or six years). Using the banlist as a proxy for overall power level, the last round of cards banned from Standard were a common, two uncommons, and a rare. The year before that, they banned two mythic rares, a rare, and two uncommons. The Modern format banlist includes twelve commons, out of 34 bans. Even the Legacy banlist, which reaches all the way back to the original sets, has four commons on it. I think that's a much better way to do it. MTG is primarily designed towards limited formats now - sealed and draft, rather than constructed of any format. And yeah, I'm sure the fact that those formats generally require buying new packs is a big factor in that - but it does actually give a mechanical reason for the booster packs, not just a monetization one. It's also a hell of a lot of fun. I don't really know if your blame is placed correctly. I suspect it isn't - AFAIK, most of Garfield's later games were far less greedy than early Magic, and many are entirely single-purchase. Considering how much Valve was responsible for pushing lootboxes in the early days, I think they're far more likely to blame. But we really don't even know how much he was involved, let alone how much he influenced the monetization.
the thing most damning about it imo is that they said they wanted to replicate the local game store TCG experience, with owning your cards being a key aspect so the game comes out with booster packs (which are a consumer unfriendly money-maker), a singles market (which they take a hefty cut of), but very weirdly forgets to include TRADING, which is probably one of the few pro consumer parts of TCGs. :thinking:
Trading doesn't give Valve a cut, which is why they didn't include it in Artifact.
thats what they get for hiring a fucking cartoon cat to help them make it.
I called this way before and nobody believed me. Artifact was never going to have trading. It was never in the plans. Due to the way the Steam economy works, enabling trading in Artifact would literally be a boolean change. They already have the Steam item system 100% hooked in; they simply disabled trading because they are never ever going to enable it. If they wanted trading, there'd be trading. End of story.
I am getting a sense of smug satisfaction seeing artifact crash and burn like this.
Without going through the thread, are there any news reports asking the people behind Artifact what they were thinking?
You really think Valve is going to communicate with their fans? You've got a better chance of Gabe dropping by and giving you a handie.
The people at Valve wanted to make a card game so they made one, Valve has never concerned itself with what the market or its fans want, its just been luck that until recently the stuff they made also happened to be what people wanted. So they all decided they wanted a card game and they went ahead and made one, doesn't matter how many people booed the reveal and how there was no hype leading up to it, Valve doesn't listen to that stuff anyway. So it came out and died like a fart in the wind, and I'm absolutely sure the people who worked on this feel bad, but its unlikely this will lead to any changes because this is an issue with the entire culture of things at Valve. This will be seen as an experiment that failed, nothing more.
I don't know about that. Both DotA 2 and came off across as obvious trend-chasing. One them was just more timely and well-executed.
Dota 2 doesn't feel so much like trend chasing, original dota was still popular and was still a jank ass Warcraft 3 mod, making it standalone on its own engine was a real no brainer and a guaranteed hit for whoever did it first.
Theres always the people who work hard on something that is supposed to be a black hole for money, despite thinking "yeah this is gonna be a good fucking game!", which in the end are wrongly blamed, and if the game doesn't do well, they get shafted. Or get shafted whatever the game ends in, be it success or failure. Activision showed us that a few weeks ago.
Valves flat structure is just terrible and I imagine it's a large part of why they've gotten so lazy. There's no one there to push them and get people to actually put in effort, so they just churn out absolute minimum effort trash.
It's low effort for the amount of money they were asking, and I imagine a card game costs a lot less time and effort than proper game does. The most offensive part of it was expecting people to pay for entry to a card game. Like if you're gonna make a card game at least have the common decency to make it F2P. This is like buying an FPS that then asks you to buy all your guns on top of the game itself.
It's funny and a little sad that this is what is bringing together a lot of our little FP community. The number of people subscribing to this thread is ticking up all the time because everyone's waiting for the next image of the record low concurrent player count. And the memes.
Well it *was* trendy, they just happened to miss the very small boat. MOBAs were still the up-and-coming thing back then, but either way the "obviousness" if it really doesn't come off across as Valve just doing thier own thing.
long ago maybe I can't really say much about Hearthstone and MTG and say that I'm right about it, because I never really followed these games, but from what I see, it seems like MTG has been famous for a while within its circle but never really being a mainstream thing, and Hearthstone is largely the same. Difference being that Hearthstone seems to have had its spotlight time a good time ago, MAYBE around the same time Overwatch was released and got its first huge updates, but after that, everything is incremental stuff and nothing that really pulls a lot of interest. Artifact on the other hand, was released in a market somewhat saturated with battle royale games. It feels like Artifact is late to a party, of which the email inviting it was sent several years ago, and only now it took time to look at the inbox, without even checking the date.
It looks like the playerbase is stabilizing around 500 players average. Not great for a brand new game.
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Sad to see HL2DM that low, but its been out for 15 years, so that's normal. Really want to play some HL2DM again now.
Hey isn't that the stupid card game nobody cares about?
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