This video gives off the impression that the game has just launched and can still bounce back in its current state when actually 2 months have passed and it remains a mess. Valve has made a couple of important updates in which they dumped some important building blocks of the game (card immutability and no progression) in favor of more sustainable ones (adjusting the balance and earning packs progressing) and yet you didn't find that important to mention? You showed a graph of when the game still had 10k peak players, yet don't mention that it has peaks of 600 players now, and is STILL decreasing which shows a completely different reality? You mentioned some of the points people attacked about this game, but not the fact that it's RNG heavy (when many people expected the opposite), or that many people found the gameplay loop boring and the base set cards to be generic and uninspired? Hell, there have even been leaks of a puzzle mode, rumors of the game going free-to-play, Garfield has stopped working on Artifact, numerous streamers have stopped covering it (even Swim, one of the staunchest defenders of Artifact) to the point where Twitch viewership has all but died, Valve has gone almost completely silent on this, and none of that goes in the video? Not even a "long haul" reference? This video told the story of Artifact well but completely lost its way in the end. I understand it's sad to see a game you're a fan of die this calamitously,but you just need to face the facts. It needs a complete overhaul to be saved at this point.
It _can_ still bounce back, but as you said, it would need to be a huge overhaul. One change I really hope to see is for them to scrap the whole market concept and make all the cards free and the game free. Valve can profit solely off cosmetics like Dota 2 and Fortnite, where you can earn currency through quests or some form of a "Battle Pass" and you can buy card/board/imp cosmetics directly. Artifact becoming the world's first truly F2P card game would definitely turn some heads and get people to play. Most likely they'll be adding more cards and modes in a forthcoming "big update" such as the puzzle mode you mentioned. There are also rumors of Valve eyeing the studio the developed Dota Auto Chess so I can see Valve hiring them and implementing a more polished version of Auto Chess into Artifact to attract more players. All and all Artifact is in a pretty pathetic state now, and I blame that on Valve/Garfield's short-sightedness, poor monetization, and lack of a proper beta period with actual feedback being taken. The future of Artifact is now in Valve's hands. If they are willing to take all the criticisms given (RNG, boring/slow games, monetization) and apply it to building a better game, then the future of Artifact can be bright.
You didn't notice the fact that this video was all about the story of announcement to launch, it just touched on the game drastically falling to indie playercount numbers but that wasn't even the point of the video. It was no disconnection from reality but it wasn't even the topic being discussed.
@@MyKeko15 I think the launch of an online game has to cover a bit more than just the launch itself. If even say the launch of the game is ongoing until the player base stabilizes...Which hasn't even happened in this case
@@MyKeko15 the video was misleading in the end tho, a lot. It stated that "the future is not clear, we need to see if the game can make a comeback etc": ...cmon, really? Artifact future couldn't be more clear, I was one of the MANY that predicted this outcome as soon as I read about its market system (the line about "yeah someone didn't like the market system but many more did it" was pure BS too: yeah SOMEONE may have like it but the overwhelming majority HATED i)..
I wonder what role the release of MTG arena (as a competitor) in a similar timeframe had on artifacts reception. Was it players trying both and Magic simply used its "magic" to win the contest?
I feel like the initial price tag is what kept the game down. I would have 100% tried the game if it was free, and I'm sure many would have, but bc of the "not for everyone nature" I don't feel like spending $20 to demo what is effectively a $100+ game
Yeah for real. I am definitely interested but not enough to throw down the initial cost. But as many state the game is not doing well so there is actually a good change Valve will drop the 20$ price with a game update somewhere this year.
Same. Was actually excited for it once I saw the Magic the Gathering guy was apart of it. But in this day and age, you cant charge for these types of games up front. Its the same reason I never bought Overwatch. Either charge me and make everything free, or free and have loot boxes. You cant have both, form me anyways.
Same here' I was interested in Artifact because I play DotA, I saw some content creators playing it and it looked fun, I even went to the store page to install it, but then when I saw that it cost money to get into it I backed out. Maybe I would've been willing to fork over the cash, but after that experience I read it was pay to win and forgot about it. If a game has an incredibly high skill ceiling, there needs to be no financial barrier of entry.
@@v2occy809 nobody in their sane mind would buy overwatch lootboxes, play a few games and you'll have so many skins you wouldn't know which ones to equip. The game is among the fairest monetizations out there
I guess the price tag is compulsory to prevent people from making new steam accounts until they unpack rare cards. I guess they could make the first 5 packs untradable and fix the number of rare cards you get by opening them
Hey guys, today we have something a little different. Our editor has been working hard on this video and we are also experimenting with diversifying our content offerings while still having a focus on Overwatch. Let us know what you think! [Edit: As some people have pointed out, this video does not include information on patches made in the past two-three months post-launch. This video was made with the intention of covering the events regarding Artifact from announcement leading up to the official launch of the game, ending off touching on how the game fell into a state of decline. If the game experiences further developments in the coming months such as major patch updates or esports announcements etc...we would love to make a followup video if there is the interest.]
They'll either abandon or more likely relaunch. It would be very hard if not impossible to regain the player base with updates at this point. Most people wouldn't even notice that the game changed.
I'm watching this on Feb 26 2019. The last thing I heard about Artifact was it lost like 99% of its player base (600 concurrent players or so) and Garfield was gone from the dev team... I don't think this game's gonna bounce back without a miracle and a major overhaul.
If I remember right, Artifect had active 60k players during their peak, and currently have less than 600 active players. This is a lost of 99% of it's player base within months after release.... VALVE, WHAAAAT ARE YOU DOOOOOINH
Not to mention that nobody asked for this, the crowd booing there. Terrible stuff. I think it's ironic how now they just took a mod and made it a standalone game and it's popular, but this time, at least, you don't have to pay a lot of money to play it.
I had to drop it because winning matches was 100% a matter of luck. If they start letting you choose your minions' attack targets I'll come back in a heartbeat.
Hey lets take our wildly popular FREE game Dota2 and combine it with another wildly popular FREE game, Hearthstone. Only, let's charge people out the ass to play it.
@@VeriStrawberi Well the main issue is that this game doesn't allow the free players to join in and play. Ever since hearthstone free to play model release, society believes that artefact should follow suit, release that as well. I can't say that hearthstone is not paid to win, but at least they allow players to try and play it with ways to slowly grind out a pack... Heck, even a popular disguised toast streamer has made a youtube video showing that he can get rank #1 with a free account.
fantastic video!! great writing, narrating, pacing and editing. you managed to tell the tale without being disrespectful, and instead letting the viewer form their own opinion. 10/10 video!!!!!!!
Another factor with Artifact's lack of success was the launch of MTG Arena in the same time period. I feel alot of card game players that may have given Artifact a bigger shot just decided to play a really polished magic card game (for the first time on computer) instead.
I feel this really hurt artifact, Arena in the contraray had very low expectations and it was a huge hit for WotC, so big the revamped all the competitive MTG scene for it.
The streamers and personalities were useless, shilling over the game for the last 6 months and when the game launched suddenly they found problems. I'm happy that half of them got their channels killed after their artifact transition.
I honestly think it's because of the warped perspective they have on such games. They're largely granted test accounts with all the cards or practically unlimited resources. A major component of any card game for most players is how you acquire cards but that angle doesn't impact streamers largely. From every thing I've seen the core gameplay loop of Artifact looks solid if a little flawed but no more so than any other game on the market. I think the cost scared off most potential players, including myself, and that's something most streamers didn't, and couldn't, see coming till the full market strategy was announced. Many predicted that the complexity would be a speed bump but most players never even got that far!
Is because between closed beta and open The game goes trough (usually) numerous changes and you dont judge it as a finished product Fatally for artifact they kept it as in beta whit a 20 dollar pricetag
I think it was a bit incorrect to mention 'pay-to-win' and then show footage of Gwent, which is one of the most f2p-friendly card games ever. Otherwise, I love the history and research!
This teaches us a couple of things: a) Valve thinks they stand above the food chain and can allow themself to be somehow the only developer to ask for money up in front for a card game. b) A game can be as pretty as it can be, if its not fun, it dies. c) All the marketing in the world wont help you if the game is not fun. It might lure people into it first trough hype, but will then decline fast. In the card game section thats the death nail, since they are build for years of income. d) Humans somehow cannot do anything without rewards, even if they play a game (which should be already reward enough). Without the feel of progression and constant envolving, humans will generally loose intrest. To me it somehow seems pretty ignorant what Valve did. Your brand, your promise of a 1 million tournament, the graphical design all of that crumbles in dust if you do go against how humans function. No fun, no progression, too many random factors and finally an entry fee.
a) And they were right. 60 000 people bough the game on launch. For a game that nobody asked for and on genre that a lot of people are already tired of. But when they will launch their next game everyone will remember artifact. They won't do this twice. d) Artifact was designed to have the same feel of progression as dota (a game some people play exclusively and for thousands of hours). A complex game where you get better every time you play. They even added a classic progression system to Artifact and it did not even slow the death of the game As you stated in b) and c) the only reason the game died is because it's simply not fun. The game rewards 1)not playing anything to keep initiative. 2)killing heroes with initiative to prevent the enemy to play anything. "Not playing anything" is the most common mechanic of the game. And it's the worst mechanic possible in a card game. On top of that with the alternate turn system you can't play 2 cards in a row. Your opponent will have the possibility to play between the two. Meaning that combos of multiples cards working together will often be impeded by your opponent and it doesn't feel good. Not even for the opponent because he doesn't know he prevented you to play a nice combo.
you forgot that every card is fucking boring as shit. Dota forgot to make their game fun. People leaving was not about lack of incremental rewards ( I refer to loot, I agree ranking system is vital), but the fact that they had to pay 200$+ for unlocking all the content of a shitty card game.
Magic Online has survived for years despite being a buy in package, despite looking like shit, despite seeing other releases and has only now begun dwindling when a newer, more polished version has come up. And even then people who enjoy other formats still play Magic Online. Yeah Arena is free but Magic Online survived Hearthstone, Shadowverse, Clash Royale solely on how far it stayed ahead of everyone in card design.
Before launch: Take THAT wizards of the coast! Your days are numbered! Post launch: You know what, wotc, you aren't as bad as I thought....Guess I'll go back to MTG!
who will win? *A multi billion dollar gaming company made card game, with epic creator and artists* or *One Independent developer making a chess game out of a modded dota 2*
Not really. The research was standard and the view point is very bias. It constantly says the game is "COMPLEX, DEEP, FOR EXPERIENCED PLAYERS" When the reality is that the game is simple, RNG HEAVY, bare bones, and the 3 lane system is completely missed and negated due to the rng, simple nature, and lack of synergy. The video was a really poor job actually addressing the real reasons the game failed and only states the obvious. I would say this is one of the worst researched videos and a simple google of the various release dates could explain the video. The editing, narration, and pacing however is amazing in the video. The actual research on why the game did not catch on is really bad. The core game itself is busted regardless of the lack of rewards.
Just make it F2P like Hearthstone, Magic Arena and every other card game and people will play it, i guarantee it. No price to get the game client, no price to get matches, no direct cards being selled, just the usual "buy packs to get cards" with ingame currency and free stuff being given from time to time. I'm one that always wanted to play it, the complexity is something that actually attracts me on this game, but Artifact's monetization system was the deal break for me.
The road from "Free to Play" to "To Expensive to Bother". Especially the change in pro response you can see with Reynad was funny. The way they would keep up the idea a game could work when "normal people" couldn't even understand it was especially funny. How would you expect a game to be succesfull when majority of people could neither play nor watch it. That would result in no player base, no viewer base, and therefor no chance of survivability. Pro's can't stream a game nobody is watching. Without players and fans, there is no game.
I'm surprised you didn't mention mtga's open beta starting so close to artifacts release. While I don't know if this affected other people, I went to ti-8 and was planning on playing artifact because I got it for free but when mtga came out it was really fun and I played it pretty constantly for a couple of months (I think I should Also note that I've played paper magic for years), and when artifact came out the first thing that I thought about it was it just wasn't as fun. Once again I don't know if other people felt the same way but if I had to guess mtga being accessible to most players before artifact was probably a hit to artifact.
Sad the game tanked so hard, Richard seemed really interested in it and the pass turn mechanic he came up with is short of perfect, fantastic for maintaining the back and forward that makes card games so fun to begin with, wish more TCG/CCGs adopted it.
It's kinda sad that even the biggest designers could not get a game right and Valve has learned nothing from other card games, it's pain points and it's solutions. A typical card game player can easily list you the most problematic things about card games and they did nothing to address them.
Its hilarious how they toted aroind richard garfield like he was the god savior of trading card games when magic in its original state was barely playable and woild be considered trash compared to the game as it is today (rules wise). Not to mentioned the guy hasnt managed to launch a successful product in the past 20+ years. Literally any high profile pro player wouldve been a better option
i think one of the major things that kind of kicked artifact in was the fact that MTG arena's ppen came out and with a much friendlier free to play model.
Valve knows how to make Games... but the Model is brutally stupid. I predicted the failure of this game because of the Money Model. The Game itselve is good, it could need improvements, but the Problems with the hole system is not about the gameplay itselve. I am really glad that this model does not work. A sign that we are all not that stupid and fall for cashgrabs. I just wonder how long they can keep there Servers up.... and then you get a message... "Thank you for playing this Cardcollection game, we are sorry to tell you that the servers will be offline soon and you loose all your collected cards and.... you know.... thats live!" If that happens the gamer community should beycott Valve.
Right after finishing watching this video I went to Twitch to see if I could find some Artifact Stream since I never really paid attention to it, the artifact page had a grand total of *75* viewers. Ouch.
This is the best video I saw on artifact, only facts and good arguments, no memes no laughs. Great job guys. Also very sad. Personaly I was blocked by the pay wall.
Considering how blizzard brought back diablo 3 from the dead and seeing how valve handled the artifact disaster, makes me think they didn't try hard enough
I've been playing Magic for 11 years, Hearthstone for 5 and Eternal for about 18 months. I've played a few games of WoW TCG, YuGiOh and Faeria on the side. These games vary in complexity but have a lot of similarities, and even though Magic is the worst offender in terms of how messed up the rules can get (hello Layers!), the base game is very simple to learn and the so-called New World Order of cards being less complex at lower rarities makes it easy for new players to jump in. Paper TCGs let you have test games with your friends or a local store, while most digital TCGs have a free to download option with microtransactions for packs or an in-game currency that lets you attain them through play. In contrast, Artifact attempted to blast the genre with a brand new paradigm (the lanes system) and wanted players to pay $15 to even try the game. Between the impression of overcomplexity and the requirement to pay up front, they really sabotaged themselves from the start and while the marketplace was a good idea, in practice it was a mess and Axe being $20 was hilarious.
Simply explained. Only Dota players would play a Card game based on Dota 2. There already is a big ass Blizzard hard game that is Free. Dota card game came out with a Prize Tag while Dota 2 is a free game.... I mean jeez when you try to compete against a successive title with a potentially smaller player base that would rather just play Dota 2 Valve just had to put a prize on it... I played Dota for 13 years now, why on earth would I play a Dota based Card game? This is an other example of the difference in mentality between different type of players. A standard blizzard player will buy all blizzard games. A Dota 2 player is a competitive player of Dota 2, he is more likely to just you know play more Dota 2 then buy a card game that is not even a MOBA game, as the one that he loves to play. A typical example of a seller not understanding his buyers. You can't make an FPS player buy a Strategy turn game based on CS:GO either. Even if some die hard fans both Artifact this game is for the Card player gamer. Not the MOBA Dota 2 gamers.
Artifact was a really fun, unique take I enjoyed my time with but the price and lack of progression kept players away. Sucks. If it picks back up again I'd love to keep at it.
The need for tickets to play special modes and the lack of trading between players ensured that this game would never be popular among a large group of people. You absolutely need a trading system in this day and age.
MTG Arena can definitely compete with HS. Smooth UI, decent Animations/voice acting, already established player base, and the complexity of Magic is still there. Tbh, if MTG Arena supported casual modes like Commander, that would be huge.
I never had an interest in playing Artifact mainly because I was unwilling to pay an initial entry fee to a game I didn't know I'd enjoy. Additionally I thought Valve's decision to make cards only obtainable from the Steam marketplace to be incredibly greedy. Had the game been free I would have tried it and quite liked it, and then if I could earn cards in game by playing for free I then would have been more likely to purchase cosmetics or perhaps a starter pack to help my collection. Their decision to move away from the f2p market doomed the game. I had previously been playing Gwent which, despite some mismanagement issues, tackled this issue perfectly with it's generous reward system. Of course their were many other contributing factors to Artifacts ultimate decline and I think you've done an excellent video highlighting that here. I appreciate you making this video, I hope to see more in the future :)
Keep an eye out, this patch is taking too much time to come out unlike most of the other patches this year and with the player base decline they might release a free mode of some sorts, hope you try the game then because I'm sure you'll enjoy it!
I think the base card set was the most important factor in the games decline. If the game was good enough people would have kept it alive long enough for perception of it to recover. But even for the core audience, there was just not enough diversity in the gameplay to make you want to keep playing past the first couple hundred hours.
i don't really get why game companies don't create a card game where everyone can have all the cards, and pay/grind only for cosmetics, animations, portratis, back of cards, and other thousand cosmetic things... You can still play an draft mode even if you have all the cards, just make the pool of cards for the draft mode random. Why in the blue hell people insist so much that card games must have "rarity" and must be pay to win.... If you want to limit the use of the cards make a game where the most powerful cards have some kind of drawback like "can have only one of this card on your deck", "super high mana costs", "can only be played after X condition is complete", and many many more ways to make powerfull cards be played less...
That's what I've been saying/hoping Artifact would do since it first launched. I still hope Valve will do something like that if they're overhauling the game, but time will tell
Valve is capable of fixing the game but there are so many problems it would be almost like making Artifact 2. I’m interested to see their next move, it can be their last chance...
I wanted to play the game, i waited to see the gameplay and i was hyped instantly, watched some videos, started to wonder what i was going to play in the game... ...and then i saw the price and i was "FUCK THIS!"
Its a card game, no one asked for it. If you ran a survey asking people what game valve should make, a card game wouldn't even appear in the top 10. The reveal made it pretty clear how people felt about the game but it was still received positively(somehow) because its Valve, and they earned that double standards. The business model got revealed and it sucks but people still bought the game and gave it a chance because.. its valve. Now to the main problem, its not fun. Its well made, very polished but not fun.(at least for most people who tried it) Artifact owners number between a 1-2 million as per steamspy but how many are left playing now? It hit 266 people lowest this week and not even reaching 1k players even on peak hours. Valve should just drop the game and focus on other IPs or new ones, anything but a fucking card game.
As someone who spend 100 dollars on buy an artifact beta key before its release, I would say my money totally worth it in a way that it's drama and memes in the last 3 month are more fun than any other entertainment that I have had in a long time.
The downfall (as if there was actually a rise...) of Artifact is twofold: First of all the monetization ruins the game big time; it makes the player pool too small to create a healthy competitive scene and not rewarding people in any way is not enough for a card game... Secondly and more importantly. The gameplay sucks if the goal is to be a serious and less casual game. The game is indeed more complex and deckbuilding is harder than in other games, but there are ridiculous "coin-flips" that completely ruin any tactical play. Obviously the random placement of minions and semi-random attack direction is a big problem; adding possibly unfair RNG that might ruin any solid tactics. But worse are the cards that are literally gamebreakingly strong or an instant loss; from what I played Slarks 50% chance to either be the strongest assasin or being barely more than a creep is kinda breaking. But worse is Tidehunter with his potetntial to stun an infinite amount of people are stun only 1 out of 20+ targets (I've seen both happen). Ruins the serious tactical nature of the game it claims to have; it's a casual card game that tries to tell you it is not. Resulting in people sticking with the better casual card games that are more self aware of their casual nature and give some rewards for playing. Such a shame... R.I.P. Artifact 2018-2018
the game is very well designed in general... but nothing works as they probably intended specifically everything in it just seems off and weird. not to mention the absolutely unnecessary randomness
I really like how you focus on the atmosphere of elitism that emanated from the game. I think THAT is the key reason for its failure. A lot of people talk about the monetisation, but that was not the problem - over a million people bought it! Making it free to play won’t do anything, hundreds of thousands of people paid for the game and they didn’t want to play it. They would presumably leave even faster if they hadn’t invested money. No, I think it’s the “Artifact is too clever for you, you’re not supposed to enjoy it, this isn’t for peasants who want to have fun, if you can’t watch it that means you’re stupid” culture that Valve enabled around the game that made people leave. If the game wasn’t going to entertain them, and the community became an echo chamber of “one has to have a considerable degree of IQ to fully appreciate Richard And Mortimer” types who argued that expecting entertainment was a weakness, why would people stick around?
Akshon Esports I know this is kind of a non-answer, but I wouldn’t try to turn it around. This may sound extreme, but if I was at Valve, I’d be talking about buying Autochess and turning off the Artifact servers, with all Artifact purchasers given some amount of IAP Autochess content for free. Valve may even be wealthy enough to consider a full refund. But at this point Artifact is a punchline, and it’s been judged and I don’t see it coming back. A lot of people won’t give it a second chance, and a lot of people WANT it to fail. It seems callous but the 600 loyal souls still playing Artifact aren’t big enough of a market to worry about, and if they storm out after Artifact gets axed, that fine, it’s the people who ARENT playing Artifact now that we’re after.
@@kayfimt7769 here's another POV, a million people bought this game and quit. A simple solution would be making the game actually good, adding an incentive to play the game just for a bit and adding other incentives to make people keep playing. If you keep 5% of the million buyers that's 50k players injected into the player base. It just takes a simple trick like, "play 5 matches to get 5 card packs " which can get players who already have the game to just log in collect their free shit and sell it on the market, but then, and I'm just stating examples I'm sure valve devs can think of better stuff, they find an actually good ranking system while playing and they like the gameplay mechanics again throughout these 5 games, so they play on the ladder more. They start enjoying the game. And so on and so on, and I'm sure that these 50k will multiply the concurrent player base by quite a while which will get a tiny bit of buzz going, that can attract a few newcomers as well, and then they can keep that tiny player base. Done and dusted. That being said, valve are already interested in buying auto chess so there's that
Karim Darwish have you noticed they don’t make sequels to flop movies? When people get burned they rarely give something a second chance, even if they’ve invested time and money. A lot of people are surprisingly willing to walk away from their $20, look at the gambling industry.
@@kayfimt7769 again if you offer something for free ppl would be okay with just trying, and again, I was talking about something where in a dire scenario 95% of the targeted base would ignore. That 5% might be all you need.
I think maybe MAYBE it could have survived with its monetization scheme if it were balanced, and (more importantly) it wasn't a shitstorm of RNG. At least Hearthstone makes its RNG fun to an extent and integral to the experience so that even if you lose the roll of the dice, it can play out in a fun, weird way. Or like Magic where the randomness is isolated solely to the card draws for the most part. Artifact has a DEVASTATING problem with Rng. In Artifact, losing a coin toss more often than not gets your hero dead, meaning you just straight up can't play cards/play the fucking game. On top of that, the random creep generation, the random directions for attacking, the immutability of creep hero placement outside of fringe cards and cost investment (limited to when you even have those cards), AND random effects on cards makes for an RNG mess, made worse by the complexity of the game and sheer amount of cards allowed on board and in hand, making planning all near impossible. Possibly worst of all is the flop and shop (I kinda wanna coin the phrase tbh). Basically, having gold and items is often times REALLY FUCKING GOOD, and often having it early means your heros/creeps clear their heroes and creeps, meaning YOU snowball gold and they can never gain traction. And this ends up happening fucking a LOT because of the flop and the random placement of the heroes, not just in which lane, but also where exactly in that lane. Most games feel like shit because you feel like the rng fucked you from where they put your heroes (even black heroes, who were designed with this in mind, meaning Garfield was aware of this issue and put a bandaid on it), and then the opponent snowballs with gold, as you wind up not even being able to play cards just because you got bad RNG. Winning or losing in those games never feels good because it doesn't feel earned, and it happened WAAAYYYY too fucking much. It felt like only 1 in 5 or 6 games had a fair flop and felt kinda fun afterwards. It makes me actually MISS manascrew/flood in Magic, it's that bad. I have no idea how that got past the testing stage, though admittedly, it felt like Garfield was just throwing out ideas for this game and wasn't fully invested in it. I mean, the 3 lane thing in an interview sounded like it was suggested to him and he went "yeah, fuck it, just put it in, why not?" He should have been asking if they should instead of saying whether they could (same with the hand/board sizes)
When you make a spin off dota card game but everyone plays a free deck building mod instead.
yep lol underlords probably cost 1/10 as much to develop too.
@@andynewen and both are dead game
This video gives off the impression that the game has just launched and can still bounce back in its current state when actually 2 months have passed and it remains a mess.
Valve has made a couple of important updates in which they dumped some important building blocks of the game (card immutability and no progression) in favor of more sustainable ones (adjusting the balance and earning packs progressing) and yet you didn't find that important to mention?
You showed a graph of when the game still had 10k peak players, yet don't mention that it has peaks of 600 players now, and is STILL decreasing which shows a completely different reality?
You mentioned some of the points people attacked about this game, but not the fact that it's RNG heavy (when many people expected the opposite), or that many people found the gameplay loop boring and the base set cards to be generic and uninspired?
Hell, there have even been leaks of a puzzle mode, rumors of the game going free-to-play, Garfield has stopped working on Artifact, numerous streamers have stopped covering it (even Swim, one of the staunchest defenders of Artifact) to the point where Twitch viewership has all but died, Valve has gone almost completely silent on this, and none of that goes in the video? Not even a "long haul" reference?
This video told the story of Artifact well but completely lost its way in the end. I understand it's sad to see a game you're a fan of die this calamitously,but you just need to face the facts. It needs a complete overhaul to be saved at this point.
It _can_ still bounce back, but as you said, it would need to be a huge overhaul. One change I really hope to see is for them to scrap the whole market concept and make all the cards free and the game free. Valve can profit solely off cosmetics like Dota 2 and Fortnite, where you can earn currency through quests or some form of a "Battle Pass" and you can buy card/board/imp cosmetics directly. Artifact becoming the world's first truly F2P card game would definitely turn some heads and get people to play. Most likely they'll be adding more cards and modes in a forthcoming "big update" such as the puzzle mode you mentioned. There are also rumors of Valve eyeing the studio the developed Dota Auto Chess so I can see Valve hiring them and implementing a more polished version of Auto Chess into Artifact to attract more players.
All and all Artifact is in a pretty pathetic state now, and I blame that on Valve/Garfield's short-sightedness, poor monetization, and lack of a proper beta period with actual feedback being taken. The future of Artifact is now in Valve's hands. If they are willing to take all the criticisms given (RNG, boring/slow games, monetization) and apply it to building a better game, then the future of Artifact can be bright.
You didn't notice the fact that this video was all about the story of announcement to launch, it just touched on the game drastically falling to indie playercount numbers but that wasn't even the point of the video. It was no disconnection from reality but it wasn't even the topic being discussed.
@@MyKeko15 I think the launch of an online game has to cover a bit more than just the launch itself. If even say the launch of the game is ongoing until the player base stabilizes...Which hasn't even happened in this case
@@MyKeko15 the video was misleading in the end tho, a lot.
It stated that "the future is not clear, we need to see if the game can make a comeback etc": ...cmon, really?
Artifact future couldn't be more clear, I was one of the MANY that predicted this outcome as soon as I read about its market system (the line about "yeah someone didn't like the market system but many more did it" was pure BS too: yeah SOMEONE may have like it but the overwhelming majority HATED i)..
I wonder what role the release of MTG arena (as a competitor) in a similar timeframe had on artifacts reception. Was it players trying both and Magic simply used its "magic" to win the contest?
I feel like the initial price tag is what kept the game down. I would have 100% tried the game if it was free, and I'm sure many would have, but bc of the "not for everyone nature" I don't feel like spending $20 to demo what is effectively a $100+ game
Yeah for real. I am definitely interested but not enough to throw down the initial cost. But as many state the game is not doing well so there is actually a good change Valve will drop the 20$ price with a game update somewhere this year.
Same. Was actually excited for it once I saw the Magic the Gathering guy was apart of it. But in this day and age, you cant charge for these types of games up front. Its the same reason I never bought Overwatch. Either charge me and make everything free, or free and have loot boxes. You cant have both, form me anyways.
Same here' I was interested in Artifact because I play DotA, I saw some content creators playing it and it looked fun, I even went to the store page to install it, but then when I saw that it cost money to get into it I backed out. Maybe I would've been willing to fork over the cash, but after that experience I read it was pay to win and forgot about it. If a game has an incredibly high skill ceiling, there needs to be no financial barrier of entry.
@@v2occy809 nobody in their sane mind would buy overwatch lootboxes, play a few games and you'll have so many skins you wouldn't know which ones to equip. The game is among the fairest monetizations out there
I guess the price tag is compulsory to prevent people from making new steam accounts until they unpack rare cards. I guess they could make the first 5 packs untradable and fix the number of rare cards you get by opening them
Hey guys, today we have something a little different. Our editor has been working hard on this video and we are also experimenting with diversifying our content offerings while still having a focus on Overwatch. Let us know what you think!
[Edit: As some people have pointed out, this video does not include information on patches made in the past two-three months post-launch. This video was made with the intention of covering the events regarding Artifact from announcement leading up to the official launch of the game, ending off touching on how the game fell into a state of decline.
If the game experiences further developments in the coming months such as major patch updates or esports announcements etc...we would love to make a followup video if there is the interest.]
14:20 - ahahaha, thats my TTS Artifact guide video xD im on TV
never in my life I've seen a game die this fast lol
how about Lawbreakers?
@@mathieulevasseur4082 Deathgarden. I bet you haven't even heard of it because it died so fast.
I heard of this game called the culling 2. I think it's just a myth
Games that were never alive don't count
One word. Battleborn
Artifact hasn't even tweeted from their official Twitter account since Dec 21 2018. Not looking good.
They'll either abandon or more likely relaunch. It would be very hard if not impossible to regain the player base with updates at this point. Most people wouldn't even notice that the game changed.
@@Luxalpa They laid off most of the team, including Richard Garfield. The game is 100% on life support.
I'm watching this on Feb 26 2019. The last thing I heard about Artifact was it lost like 99% of its player base (600 concurrent players or so) and Garfield was gone from the dev team... I don't think this game's gonna bounce back without a miracle and a major overhaul.
If I remember right, Artifect had active 60k players during their peak, and currently have less than 600 active players.
This is a lost of 99% of it's player base within months after release.... VALVE, WHAAAAT ARE YOU DOOOOOINH
Jesus... I knew it was doing bad but I didn't realize it was this bad. Has to be one of the biggest flops in recent memory.
Wow
Not to mention that nobody asked for this, the crowd booing there. Terrible stuff. I think it's ironic how now they just took a mod and made it a standalone game and it's popular, but this time, at least, you don't have to pay a lot of money to play it.
Story of "dead on arrival" the card game.
When you pull all your resources into a game, that has less daily players than Team Fortress 2.
I had to drop it because winning matches was 100% a matter of luck. If they start letting you choose your minions' attack targets I'll come back in a heartbeat.
This got to me too. I had won and lost getting lucky/unlucky with minion attack direction. Change that and the game would have been great.
RIP ARTIFACT 2018-2018
According to steam chartts, Artifact peak players in the last 30 days is
600 daily players... damn
@@felathar1985 better than MVCI at least which had a peak of 10 users IIRC
Hey lets take our wildly popular FREE game Dota2 and combine it with another wildly popular FREE game, Hearthstone. Only, let's charge people out the ass to play it.
TLDR, Artifact is pay and pay and pay to play.
this is the stupidest take ever. I don't even like the game, but its one of the least pay to play games there is.
@@VeriStrawberi Well the main issue is that this game doesn't allow the free players to join in and play.
Ever since hearthstone free to play model release, society believes that artefact should follow suit, release that as well.
I can't say that hearthstone is not paid to win, but at least they allow players to try and play it with ways to slowly grind out a pack...
Heck, even a popular disguised toast streamer has made a youtube video showing that he can get rank #1 with a free account.
Player count is now down to 67 people...
fantastic video!! great writing, narrating, pacing and editing. you managed to tell the tale without being disrespectful, and instead letting the viewer form their own opinion. 10/10 video!!!!!!!
AngerMania my thoughts exactly! I was blown away from start to finish the quality of the video in all aspects. Holy cow!
Another factor with Artifact's lack of success was the launch of MTG Arena in the same time period. I feel alot of card game players that may have given Artifact a bigger shot just decided to play a really polished magic card game (for the first time on computer) instead.
not to mention magic arena is free
I feel this really hurt artifact, Arena in the contraray had very low expectations and it was a huge hit for WotC, so big the revamped all the competitive MTG scene for it.
This somehow remind me of Fyre Festival, the nerd version.
Cyberpunk 2077: Hold my glitches...
The streamers and personalities were useless, shilling over the game for the last 6 months and when the game launched suddenly they found problems. I'm happy that half of them got their channels killed after their artifact transition.
one streamer called savjz said people who thought Artifact was boring had a low IQ. Can't believe the amount of shill from streamers
I honestly think it's because of the warped perspective they have on such games. They're largely granted test accounts with all the cards or practically unlimited resources. A major component of any card game for most players is how you acquire cards but that angle doesn't impact streamers largely.
From every thing I've seen the core gameplay loop of Artifact looks solid if a little flawed but no more so than any other game on the market. I think the cost scared off most potential players, including myself, and that's something most streamers didn't, and couldn't, see coming till the full market strategy was announced. Many predicted that the complexity would be a speed bump but most players never even got that far!
Did channels really die after they switched over?
Think StanCifka's RUclips died on this
Is because between closed beta and open
The game goes trough (usually) numerous changes and you dont judge it as a finished product
Fatally for artifact they kept it as in beta whit a 20 dollar pricetag
I think it was a bit incorrect to mention 'pay-to-win' and then show footage of Gwent, which is one of the most f2p-friendly card games ever. Otherwise, I love the history and research!
Gwent sucks now
OK now part 2, Dec. 1 - Feb. 28
Is ded. Thanks for watching!
This is by far best content on the web about story of artifact.
I have already forgotten about this game.
This teaches us a couple of things:
a) Valve thinks they stand above the food chain and can allow themself to be somehow the only developer to ask for money up in front for a card game.
b) A game can be as pretty as it can be, if its not fun, it dies.
c) All the marketing in the world wont help you if the game is not fun. It might lure people into it first trough hype, but will then decline fast. In the card game section thats the death nail, since they are build for years of income.
d) Humans somehow cannot do anything without rewards, even if they play a game (which should be already reward enough).
Without the feel of progression and constant envolving, humans will generally loose intrest.
To me it somehow seems pretty ignorant what Valve did. Your brand, your promise of a 1 million tournament, the graphical design all of that crumbles in dust if you do go against how humans function. No fun, no progression, too many random factors and finally an entry fee.
a) And they were right. 60 000 people bough the game on launch. For a game that nobody asked for and on genre that a lot of people are already tired of.
But when they will launch their next game everyone will remember artifact. They won't do this twice.
d) Artifact was designed to have the same feel of progression as dota (a game some people play exclusively and for thousands of hours). A complex game where you get better every time you play. They even added a classic progression system to Artifact and it did not even slow the death of the game
As you stated in b) and c) the only reason the game died is because it's simply not fun.
The game rewards 1)not playing anything to keep initiative. 2)killing heroes with initiative to prevent the enemy to play anything.
"Not playing anything" is the most common mechanic of the game. And it's the worst mechanic possible in a card game.
On top of that with the alternate turn system you can't play 2 cards in a row. Your opponent will have the possibility to play between the two.
Meaning that combos of multiples cards working together will often be impeded by your opponent and it doesn't feel good. Not even for the opponent because he doesn't know he prevented you to play a nice combo.
you forgot that every card is fucking boring as shit. Dota forgot to make their game fun. People leaving was not about lack of incremental rewards ( I refer to loot, I agree ranking system is vital), but the fact that they had to pay 200$+ for unlocking all the content of a shitty card game.
Magic Online has survived for years despite being a buy in package, despite looking like shit, despite seeing other releases and has only now begun dwindling when a newer, more polished version has come up. And even then people who enjoy other formats still play Magic Online. Yeah Arena is free but Magic Online survived Hearthstone, Shadowverse, Clash Royale solely on how far it stayed ahead of everyone in card design.
Easy way to see if a game will survive. Check how many people are streaming it months after release. Right now, 1 on Twitch with 4 viewers.
Artifact 2 is confirmed to be coming be Gabe Newell himself
"Many were expecting a smash hit."
LOL
Good video but dead game. Thank you for your work.
deffo dead
Really like your style - you guys could make full length documentaries.
If the demand is there for more esports videos in addition to our Overwatch coverage then we'd love to make more stuff on this channel.
Before launch: Take THAT wizards of the coast! Your days are numbered!
Post launch: You know what, wotc, you aren't as bad as I thought....Guess I'll go back to MTG!
who will win?
*A multi billion dollar gaming company made card game, with epic creator and artists*
or
*One Independent developer making a chess game out of a modded dota 2*
Exceptionally good video. Excellent research and editing. 10/10
Thanks!
Not really. The research was standard and the view point is very bias. It constantly says the game is "COMPLEX, DEEP, FOR EXPERIENCED PLAYERS" When the reality is that the game is simple, RNG HEAVY, bare bones, and the 3 lane system is completely missed and negated due to the rng, simple nature, and lack of synergy.
The video was a really poor job actually addressing the real reasons the game failed and only states the obvious. I would say this is one of the worst researched videos and a simple google of the various release dates could explain the video. The editing, narration, and pacing however is amazing in the video. The actual research on why the game did not catch on is really bad. The core game itself is busted regardless of the lack of rewards.
I dig it! Can you do a video on Battlerite? They just got a MASSIVE update a week ago, and I absolutely am OBSESSED with it atm.
Hearthstone scraped the idea of drafting based on rarity. They put the similar win rate cards into buckets and had drafting based on buckets.
I really like this format of video, and yall did a good job with it. Keep it up!
Valve have not been innovative for 20 years now... What are you talking bout son?
The quality of your videos is amazing, keep it up.
Just make it F2P like Hearthstone, Magic Arena and every other card game and people will play it, i guarantee it. No price to get the game client, no price to get matches, no direct cards being selled, just the usual "buy packs to get cards" with ingame currency and free stuff being given from time to time. I'm one that always wanted to play it, the complexity is something that actually attracts me on this game, but Artifact's monetization system was the deal break for me.
The road from "Free to Play" to "To Expensive to Bother".
Especially the change in pro response you can see with Reynad was funny.
The way they would keep up the idea a game could work when "normal people" couldn't even understand it was especially funny.
How would you expect a game to be succesfull when majority of people could neither play nor watch it.
That would result in no player base, no viewer base, and therefor no chance of survivability.
Pro's can't stream a game nobody is watching.
Without players and fans, there is no game.
I'm surprised you didn't mention mtga's open beta starting so close to artifacts release. While I don't know if this affected other people, I went to ti-8 and was planning on playing artifact because I got it for free but when mtga came out it was really fun and I played it pretty constantly for a couple of months (I think I should Also note that I've played paper magic for years), and when artifact came out the first thing that I thought about it was it just wasn't as fun. Once again I don't know if other people felt the same way but if I had to guess mtga being accessible to most players before artifact was probably a hit to artifact.
Sad the game tanked so hard, Richard seemed really interested in it and the pass turn mechanic he came up with is short of perfect, fantastic for maintaining the back and forward that makes card games so fun to begin with, wish more TCG/CCGs adopted it.
It's kinda sad that even the biggest designers could not get a game right and Valve has learned nothing from other card games, it's pain points and it's solutions. A typical card game player can easily list you the most problematic things about card games and they did nothing to address them.
Its hilarious how they toted aroind richard garfield like he was the god savior of trading card games when magic in its original state was barely playable and woild be considered trash compared to the game as it is today (rules wise). Not to mentioned the guy hasnt managed to launch a successful product in the past 20+ years. Literally any high profile pro player wouldve been a better option
i LOVE card games. There's just so much that's kept me away from Artifact. The paywall is huge for me..
Would honestly like more of this content! :)
If there is enough demand we'd love to make more!
i think one of the major things that kind of kicked artifact in was the fact that MTG arena's ppen came out and with a much friendlier free to play model.
Who narrates this video? He sounds like Kevin Perjurer from Defunctland
Valve knows how to make Games... but the Model is brutally stupid. I predicted the failure of this game because of the Money Model. The Game itselve is good, it could need improvements, but the Problems with the hole system is not about the gameplay itselve. I am really glad that this model does not work. A sign that we are all not that stupid and fall for cashgrabs. I just wonder how long they can keep there Servers up.... and then you get a message... "Thank you for playing this Cardcollection game, we are sorry to tell you that the servers will be offline soon and you loose all your collected cards and.... you know.... thats live!" If that happens the gamer community should beycott Valve.
valve "knew" how to make games... but for almost half a decade, they didnt really do much with that knowledge...
Watching this in 2021 after artifact is officially declared dead. Depressing, I genuinely wanted to try this... even if it was trash.
Right after finishing watching this video I went to Twitch to see if I could find some Artifact Stream since I never really paid attention to it, the artifact page had a grand total of *75* viewers.
Ouch.
I see 38 lol
This is the best video I saw on artifact, only facts and good arguments, no memes no laughs. Great job guys. Also very sad. Personaly I was blocked by the pay wall.
The main mechanics and complexity of the game should change equal as the player grows more mature
Considering how blizzard brought back diablo 3 from the dead and seeing how valve handled the artifact disaster, makes me think they didn't try hard enough
there are only 81 people playing now, the game is dead.
bro if artifact was f2p with tons of custom cosmetic things to buy with real money the game would be doing so great right now imo
I'd love more of these.
I've been playing Magic for 11 years, Hearthstone for 5 and Eternal for about 18 months. I've played a few games of WoW TCG, YuGiOh and Faeria on the side. These games vary in complexity but have a lot of similarities, and even though Magic is the worst offender in terms of how messed up the rules can get (hello Layers!), the base game is very simple to learn and the so-called New World Order of cards being less complex at lower rarities makes it easy for new players to jump in. Paper TCGs let you have test games with your friends or a local store, while most digital TCGs have a free to download option with microtransactions for packs or an in-game currency that lets you attain them through play.
In contrast, Artifact attempted to blast the genre with a brand new paradigm (the lanes system) and wanted players to pay $15 to even try the game. Between the impression of overcomplexity and the requirement to pay up front, they really sabotaged themselves from the start and while the marketplace was a good idea, in practice it was a mess and Axe being $20 was hilarious.
Thumbs up if you forgot TES even had a card game
Simply explained. Only Dota players would play a Card game based on Dota 2. There already is a big ass Blizzard hard game that is Free. Dota card game came out with a Prize Tag while Dota 2 is a free game.... I mean jeez when you try to compete against a successive title with a potentially smaller player base that would rather just play Dota 2 Valve just had to put a prize on it... I played Dota for 13 years now, why on earth would I play a Dota based Card game?
This is an other example of the difference in mentality between different type of players. A standard blizzard player will buy all blizzard games. A Dota 2 player is a competitive player of Dota 2, he is more likely to just you know play more Dota 2 then buy a card game that is not even a MOBA game, as the one that he loves to play. A typical example of a seller not understanding his buyers. You can't make an FPS player buy a Strategy turn game based on CS:GO either. Even if some die hard fans both Artifact this game is for the Card player gamer. Not the MOBA Dota 2 gamers.
Artifact was a really fun, unique take I enjoyed my time with but the price and lack of progression kept players away. Sucks. If it picks back up again I'd love to keep at it.
Ded game cuz they made everything cost money
Why doesn't anyone play this game? Arguably Half life 3 would've performed far better
The need for tickets to play special modes and the lack of trading between players ensured that this game would never be popular among a large group of people. You absolutely need a trading system in this day and age.
Liking the different games being covered and amazing production like this
Hearthstone players just wanted a game that could compete with Hearthstone so Hearthstone would get updates haha
MTG Arena can definitely compete with HS. Smooth UI, decent Animations/voice acting, already established player base, and the complexity of Magic is still there. Tbh, if MTG Arena supported casual modes like Commander, that would be huge.
Alien i don’t see commander support but I can see them add brawl to the game
Thanks for playing the Beta, I am waiting for the real release
I never had an interest in playing Artifact mainly because I was unwilling to pay an initial entry fee to a game I didn't know I'd enjoy. Additionally I thought Valve's decision to make cards only obtainable from the Steam marketplace to be incredibly greedy. Had the game been free I would have tried it and quite liked it, and then if I could earn cards in game by playing for free I then would have been more likely to purchase cosmetics or perhaps a starter pack to help my collection. Their decision to move away from the f2p market doomed the game. I had previously been playing Gwent which, despite some mismanagement issues, tackled this issue perfectly with it's generous reward system. Of course their were many other contributing factors to Artifacts ultimate decline and I think you've done an excellent video highlighting that here. I appreciate you making this video, I hope to see more in the future :)
Keep an eye out, this patch is taking too much time to come out unlike most of the other patches this year and with the player base decline they might release a free mode of some sorts, hope you try the game then because I'm sure you'll enjoy it!
I think the base card set was the most important factor in the games decline. If the game was good enough people would have kept it alive long enough for perception of it to recover. But even for the core audience, there was just not enough diversity in the gameplay to make you want to keep playing past the first couple hundred hours.
Great video!
well summed up and wonderfully edited
And then Auto Chess happened. RIP Artifact.
i don't really get why game companies don't create a card game where everyone can have all the cards, and pay/grind only for cosmetics, animations, portratis, back of cards, and other thousand cosmetic things... You can still play an draft mode even if you have all the cards, just make the pool of cards for the draft mode random. Why in the blue hell people insist so much that card games must have "rarity" and must be pay to win.... If you want to limit the use of the cards make a game where the most powerful cards have some kind of drawback like "can have only one of this card on your deck", "super high mana costs", "can only be played after X condition is complete", and many many more ways to make powerfull cards be played less...
That's what I've been saying/hoping Artifact would do since it first launched. I still hope Valve will do something like that if they're overhauling the game, but time will tell
If they made all cards available and relied on card cosmetics, it would be successful like dota 2.
The economy did it for me. I'm not paying £16 for a F2P game.
This game is still 110 liras (20 $) to play and only about 200 people play it on average.
Valve is capable of fixing the game but there are so many problems it would be almost like making Artifact 2.
I’m interested to see their next move, it can be their last chance...
4:07 RIP papi
i was never excited about it.
Nice summary, good work.
Wow, such a great video. You've just got an extra sub
Welcome!
What's the outro song? Fantastic video.
I wanted to play the game, i waited to see the gameplay and i was hyped instantly, watched some videos, started to wonder what i was going to play in the game...
...and then i saw the price and i was "FUCK THIS!"
Its a card game, no one asked for it.
If you ran a survey asking people what game valve should make, a card game wouldn't even appear in the top 10.
The reveal made it pretty clear how people felt about the game but it was still received positively(somehow) because its Valve, and they earned that double standards.
The business model got revealed and it sucks but people still bought the game and gave it a chance because.. its valve.
Now to the main problem, its not fun. Its well made, very polished but not fun.(at least for most people who tried it)
Artifact owners number between a 1-2 million as per steamspy but how many are left playing now? It hit 266 people lowest this week and not even reaching 1k players even on peak hours.
Valve should just drop the game and focus on other IPs or new ones, anything but a fucking card game.
As someone who spend 100 dollars on buy an artifact beta key before its release, I would say my money totally worth it in a way that it's drama and memes in the last 3 month are more fun than any other entertainment that I have had in a long time.
The downfall (as if there was actually a rise...) of Artifact is twofold: First of all the monetization ruins the game big time; it makes the player pool too small to create a healthy competitive scene and not rewarding people in any way is not enough for a card game...
Secondly and more importantly. The gameplay sucks if the goal is to be a serious and less casual game. The game is indeed more complex and deckbuilding is harder than in other games, but there are ridiculous "coin-flips" that completely ruin any tactical play. Obviously the random placement of minions and semi-random attack direction is a big problem; adding possibly unfair RNG that might ruin any solid tactics. But worse are the cards that are literally gamebreakingly strong or an instant loss; from what I played Slarks 50% chance to either be the strongest assasin or being barely more than a creep is kinda breaking. But worse is Tidehunter with his potetntial to stun an infinite amount of people are stun only 1 out of 20+ targets (I've seen both happen). Ruins the serious tactical nature of the game it claims to have; it's a casual card game that tries to tell you it is not. Resulting in people sticking with the better casual card games that are more self aware of their casual nature and give some rewards for playing.
Such a shame... R.I.P. Artifact 2018-2018
looking back, seems they were hopeful that Artifact will succeed. Spoiler alert, it never did.
the game is very well designed in general... but nothing works as they probably intended specifically
everything in it just seems off and weird. not to mention the absolutely unnecessary randomness
You decided to talk about Artifact when there is Auto Chess
You didn't mention that the Main reason of Artifact fail is that This game is not Half-Life 3.
i know this is of topic but can somewhome tell me the name of the music that starts at 10:00 thanks
129 24-Hour Peak Players as of 2/3/2020
Keep up the good work!
Thanks, happy to hear you enjoyed the video!
If they make a polished standalone version of Auto Chess then I'll forgive them :)
If you want to make a successful game you need it to have low skill floor, and mid-high skill cap
**ARTIFUCKED**
did they ever do the 1 million tournament?
They haven't even brought it up since launch. It was supposed to be happening early 2019 - now we're at the end of Q1 with no word - it's dead.
they're pretending like they never said so, typical valve. Promise something then pretend like they never said a word.
And now it's dead in the water.
Genital Thunderstorm She's at the bottom of the ocean. Lost in the abyss for eternity.
I really like how you focus on the atmosphere of elitism that emanated from the game. I think THAT is the key reason for its failure. A lot of people talk about the monetisation, but that was not the problem - over a million people bought it! Making it free to play won’t do anything, hundreds of thousands of people paid for the game and they didn’t want to play it. They would presumably leave even faster if they hadn’t invested money.
No, I think it’s the “Artifact is too clever for you, you’re not supposed to enjoy it, this isn’t for peasants who want to have fun, if you can’t watch it that means you’re stupid” culture that Valve enabled around the game that made people leave. If the game wasn’t going to entertain them, and the community became an echo chamber of “one has to have a considerable degree of IQ to fully appreciate Richard And Mortimer” types who argued that expecting entertainment was a weakness, why would people stick around?
What do you think it will take from Valve to turn this game around?
Akshon Esports I know this is kind of a non-answer, but I wouldn’t try to turn it around. This may sound extreme, but if I was at Valve, I’d be talking about buying Autochess and turning off the Artifact servers, with all Artifact purchasers given some amount of IAP Autochess content for free. Valve may even be wealthy enough to consider a full refund.
But at this point Artifact is a punchline, and it’s been judged and I don’t see it coming back. A lot of people won’t give it a second chance, and a lot of people WANT it to fail. It seems callous but the 600 loyal souls still playing Artifact aren’t big enough of a market to worry about, and if they storm out after Artifact gets axed, that fine, it’s the people who ARENT playing Artifact now that we’re after.
@@kayfimt7769 here's another POV, a million people bought this game and quit. A simple solution would be making the game actually good, adding an incentive to play the game just for a bit and adding other incentives to make people keep playing. If you keep 5% of the million buyers that's 50k players injected into the player base. It just takes a simple trick like, "play 5 matches to get 5 card packs " which can get players who already have the game to just log in collect their free shit and sell it on the market, but then, and I'm just stating examples I'm sure valve devs can think of better stuff, they find an actually good ranking system while playing and they like the gameplay mechanics again throughout these 5 games, so they play on the ladder more. They start enjoying the game. And so on and so on, and I'm sure that these 50k will multiply the concurrent player base by quite a while which will get a tiny bit of buzz going, that can attract a few newcomers as well, and then they can keep that tiny player base. Done and dusted. That being said, valve are already interested in buying auto chess so there's that
Karim Darwish have you noticed they don’t make sequels to flop movies? When people get burned they rarely give something a second chance, even if they’ve invested time and money. A lot of people are surprisingly willing to walk away from their $20, look at the gambling industry.
@@kayfimt7769 again if you offer something for free ppl would be okay with just trying, and again, I was talking about something where in a dire scenario 95% of the targeted base would ignore. That 5% might be all you need.
I think maybe MAYBE it could have survived with its monetization scheme if it were balanced, and (more importantly) it wasn't a shitstorm of RNG. At least Hearthstone makes its RNG fun to an extent and integral to the experience so that even if you lose the roll of the dice, it can play out in a fun, weird way. Or like Magic where the randomness is isolated solely to the card draws for the most part.
Artifact has a DEVASTATING problem with Rng. In Artifact, losing a coin toss more often than not gets your hero dead, meaning you just straight up can't play cards/play the fucking game. On top of that, the random creep generation, the random directions for attacking, the immutability of creep hero placement outside of fringe cards and cost investment (limited to when you even have those cards), AND random effects on cards makes for an RNG mess, made worse by the complexity of the game and sheer amount of cards allowed on board and in hand, making planning all near impossible.
Possibly worst of all is the flop and shop (I kinda wanna coin the phrase tbh). Basically, having gold and items is often times REALLY FUCKING GOOD, and often having it early means your heros/creeps clear their heroes and creeps, meaning YOU snowball gold and they can never gain traction. And this ends up happening fucking a LOT because of the flop and the random placement of the heroes, not just in which lane, but also where exactly in that lane. Most games feel like shit because you feel like the rng fucked you from where they put your heroes (even black heroes, who were designed with this in mind, meaning Garfield was aware of this issue and put a bandaid on it), and then the opponent snowballs with gold, as you wind up not even being able to play cards just because you got bad RNG. Winning or losing in those games never feels good because it doesn't feel earned, and it happened WAAAYYYY too fucking much. It felt like only 1 in 5 or 6 games had a fair flop and felt kinda fun afterwards. It makes me actually MISS manascrew/flood in Magic, it's that bad. I have no idea how that got past the testing stage, though admittedly, it felt like Garfield was just throwing out ideas for this game and wasn't fully invested in it. I mean, the 3 lane thing in an interview sounded like it was suggested to him and he went "yeah, fuck it, just put it in, why not?" He should have been asking if they should instead of saying whether they could (same with the hand/board sizes)
I actually had a lot of hope for this game
Wait shouldn't this video be called Artifact: Everything before the Launch (then 30 seconds on that)