Let’s not deny the obvious: Artifact failed. That is why for more than a year now we can write news that its online has doubled, then fell, because the entire audience of the game today is a couple of hundred people. At the same time, Riot Games proved with its Legends of Runeterra that the CCI genre is still in demand, which means that Valve’s endless work on Artifact 2.0 seemed to make sense and ceased to seem like a desperate attempt to revive a stillborn monster. I think a big role in this process can be played by Dota 2, which also began to lose its audience – and that’s why.
Complete deck of challenges
Artifact is problematic in everything – primarily in the very concept of the final product. Instead of starting from existing developments and trying to help the genre take a qualitative step forward, Valve released an archaic game, many of whose mechanics went against what fans of modern CCI are used to.
The company could make a convenient deck collection mode, which would allow copying the achievements of other players and buying up the missing cards in one click. Could take into account the experience of Dotabuff and immediately launch advanced in-game statistics for a deeper analysis of matches. Could immediately allow users to release custom game modes, as well as introduce at least some kind of system of replays and joint views. But none of this has been and is not in Artifact so far – even a year and a half after the release.
But there is an outdated system of selling cards, which scares beginners and prevents developers from releasing patches that change the balance of the game. There is an unsuccessful model with competitive tickets, which in fact only makes the main mode less popular. There are still many mechanics and animations that drag out already long games – and this goes against everything that the more successful Artifact competitors in the genre did, “firing” just because they managed to make KKI casual entertainment.
I do not agree with the criticism that fell upon Artifact – I liked this game, and I still keep all the cards of the first series in the collection. But even I have to admit that the CCI turned out to be an unnecessarily bold experiment. Valve tried to reverse the genre that Hearthstone had already upturned before, but not a bit closer to its goal. Now Artifact is on its way to a second birth – actually rebooting – and this is what can be expected in the new version of the game.
Inevitable change of model
According to insider Tyler McVicker, the studio was still able to accept the obvious – the CCI pay-2-play system has stopped working since Blizzard released Hearthstone. Therefore, now Valve is set to transfer Artifact to free rails, make all cards publicly available and monetize exclusively cosmetic elements of the game.
For the most part, even this is enough to interest and re-engage a significant portion of those people who managed to buy the game. If you open the discussion of Artifact two years ago, it will not be difficult to notice: most often users criticized the monetization, expensive Axes and the sale of tickets that were needed to run the main modes. Having got rid of this, Valve will be able to remove the label of a soulless pumping machine from the game. But I doubt that the studio has been preparing a monetization revamp for a whole year – we definitely have the right to expect more.
Fan Wishlist
But what else can the Valve audience offer? In fact, a lot. We know for sure that the company is ready for radical measures – it has already fired chief game designer Richard Garfield, and therefore there should be no doubt that future changes will affect even Cor-mechanic Artifact, turning it into a completely different game.
According to an insider, Valve realized (albeit with an unforgivable delay) that she missed a lot, defining the target audience of Artifact. In fact, the company threw the game into the market, not figuring out what a potential Artifact fan looks like.
The fact is that the modern player in the CCI does not want to spend 40 minutes in matches. The recipe for success for Hearthstone is that it retained the mechanics of classic collectible “cartons”, but simplified them just enough to cut lots to 10-15 minutes.
No matter how much I love the current Artifact format, I have to admit – the game needs changes in the gameplay, otherwise soon there will be literally one Jake SirActionSlacks Kanner. Rumor has it that Valve intends to abandon moving between boards in the CCI, as well as limit the maximum number of units on each line to five. If this happens, the game will really be faster, while retaining its main features, but I will still miss the opportunity to spam the entire field with cards with zombies.
An important role in the success of other CCIs was played by a timely release on mobile platforms – so Hearthstone ceased to compete with full-scale game titles and turned into excellent entertainment for trips, lunch breaks, and sometimes even for boring lectures. If, with the release of the update, Artifact 2.0 also gets a mobile version, this will be a good move from Valve, as it will help to reach a casual audience – one that does not even know about the failed release of the game.
According to an insider, Valve is really preparing the Artifact mobile client. Moreover, it is he who is now a priority – the new KKI interface will be sharpened for small touchscreens. It will still be possible to play Artifact on a PC, but this time Valve will bet on a profile platform for the genre – just like it was with the release of Underlords.
By the way, some kind of collaboration with Underlords could also help both games. Valve’s auto-butler has been steadily losing its audience since the release, its average online is about to drop below 10 thousand users. A joint event, a common storyline, or even a restart in a single client – all this can help Valve unite the few audiences of these games.
Helping hand
Valve has another problematic product – Dota 2. In 2019, the game lost the status of the “flagship” of the reborn Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, and now continues to lose its audience at a fast pace. On February 10, 2023, the peak online “DotA” fell to the 2013 figures, and it’s time for Valve to take care of this situation.
One of the possible reasons for this is the lack of any training mode in Dota 2. Recent patches have greatly complicated the game, so its development has become an almost impossible task for beginners. In January, references to certain educational quests were found in Dota files – one of them, apparently, will be associated with Phantom Assassin. Perhaps this is where the reboot of Artifact comes in handy – the last time Valve tried to expand the Dota universe with the first release of the card game. It is possible that restarting it now will serve the same purpose.
Fans of Dota 2 have long criticized the studio for abandoning the development of the ENT game. The example of League of Legends, which receives beautiful cinematics and comics, has long been an eyesore for all of us – now Valve has a good reason to slightly reduce the gap from the competitor, at least in this matter. I don’t know about you, but I’ll definitely be on a hype if before the TI10 final I’ll be shown a storyline about the game world that will launch a line of related quests in Artifact and Dota 2. Well, isn’t that a dream?
Controlled fall
The company said more than a year ago that it had begun work on updating Artifact, but since then the game has not released a single patch, and all of its social networks have been safely overgrown with moss. The theory that the studio simply threw the CCI to die, deciding to pretend that there was never a game, begins to look less and less crazy every day. However, recently a peculiar schedule of the studio’s work on saving Artifact appeared on the network, and it seems to me that you can trust him.
According to insiders, the situation developed as follows: after the obvious failure of the game, Valve decided to restart it completely and fired Richard Garfield. Such a measure was needed so that the “liberated” developers could take a fresh look at the game and propose solutions, even the most radical ones.
Concepts soon arose, but Valve did not dare to show them to the players. Firstly, because there were simply no players. And secondly, because the assessment of Artifact in the eyes of the community by that time had long hit the bottom – in such circumstances, a constructive dialogue about the wishes of the audience could not work. It was then that the developers decided on an interesting maneuver – the team was given the task of “selling” the new Artifact not to players, but to Valve colleagues.
In superclosed beta testing, developers were able to weed out all unnecessary ideas and come to the new Artifact concept, which became the final one – its approval took place in December 2019. Now the game has been launched into full-scale development and, brought to mind, it will ultimately be demonstrated to the players.
If Valve really chose this approach, then everything looks quite logical. I can even explain to myself why the studio wanted to remove the game from the info field for a whole year. The company simply wants the whole hat – no matter how deserved and fair it may be – at least a little forgotten. Indeed, in the opposite case, even a truly successful, high-quality and well-thought-out restart can fail due to the bias of the community. And neither Valve, nor those hundred players who still sincerely love Artifact would really like this.
