Artifact Review-Bombed on Steam

Artifact, Valve’s new DOTA 2-based card game, was released earlier this week. And while many people were quick to point out it’s clever, fun, and a fresh new take on the online trading card game genre, even more people were quicker to point out that its monetization system is still a load of crap. And in the roughly two days that have passed since it was first released to the public, the game is now sitting at a “mixed” score with over 2,200 negative reviews.

And even the positive reviews are pretty sarcastic. Hell, the most helpful review, at time of writing, is actually a positive one that says: “And now it’s time for me to play my strongest card: my credit card”.

But yes, while there are technically more positive reviews than negative ones, people are uniformly complaining about issues we’d already known and talked about earlier. Right now, the biggest complaint (and a fairly good one) is the observation that the meta affects prices. Right now, the Axe hero card is considered the most powerful in the game, and since demand for it is high, so are the prices: sitting at around 15 bucks a pop, at time of writing. To be competitive, it basically means you have to pay that cost, which of course, lines Valve’s pockets.

But the other complaints are valid too: the lack of a proper competitive mode, no social features, and how just about everything costs real money.

The positive reviews, on the other hand, say that the game is just straight-up good fun, and a few people even go so far as to defend the pricing model, saying it’s either not terribly different from real-life trading cards, or that it’s actually pretty cheap compared to other online games (like Hearthstone).

Regardless, if all these negative reviews affect sales, or make Valve nervous, we’ll just have to wait and see.