Valve had high hopes for their CCG game Artifact when they released it back in November 2018, but it unfortunately has drastically underperformed. A $19.99 price tag on top of a in-game economy that relied on trading cards with real money via Steam at launch and an overall lack of communication from Valve all likely played a role in the game’s disappointing performance.
After being silent for two months, Valve finally addressed the community about these issues and made it clear that some big, but still unspecified, changes are coming. The developers were nothing but blunt about the game’s performance. “Obviously, things didn’t turn out how we hoped. Artifact represents the largest discrepancy between our expectations for how one of our games would be received and the actual outcome,” they said.
Because of this, Valve’s “plan…to immediately dive into our normal strategy of shipping a series of updates driven by the dialogue community members were having,” didn’t work as intended; instead, it made the developers notice “that there are deep-rooted issues with the game and that our original update strategy of releasing new features and cards would be insufficient to address them.” As a result the team plans to “re-examine the decisions we’ve made along the way regarding game design, the economy, the social experience of playing, and more.”
Now that Valve is in the process of thoroughly reexamining Artifact, they did admit that their focus will be on fixing these issues instead of release consistent content updates for the game for “a significant amount of time.” While this news is likely disappointing to those who still avidly play Artifact, whenever these updates do arrive they will likely only be good for the game and its community.
Artifact is available on Steam right now, though it’s peak player count in the past 24 hours was only 292 players so it’s probably better to wait for these potential changes before picking the game up.
The post Artifact is Being Reworked by Valve Because “Things Didn’t Turn Out How We Hoped” by Tomas Franzese appeared first on DualShockers.