Artifact Suffers Severe Drop in Players

Despite the outrage that had exploded around Artifact when it was first announced, it had more than a few defenders, namely the reviewers and people who were absolutely charmed by the fact that it was, in fact, a very well-designed TCG at the end of the day. They're also reminding people that there’s a reason people once liked Valve for actually making video games. Unfortunately, it still had to contend with its crappy (but well-deserved) reputation, and it seems for all the praise the game received it didn’t translate to staying power, because according to SteamCharts and SteamDB (but I learned from PC Gamer), it’s lost a great deal of its users in the two weeks it’s been around.

The numbers are pretty telling: In the past 24 hours, the number of concurrent players peaked at 11,596, which still puts it in the top 20 of all games played on Steam, but it’s a rather sharp drop from the 60,740 players that were playing at launch.

As for what could explain this sudden dip, there are a few things that jump to mind. It’s not uncommon for people to swarm a game at launch, so a natural dip is something that’s very normal and expected. But it could also amount to people waiting for cards to get cheaper on the marketplace (so waiting for the hype to die down some), waiting for those improved social/client features that Valve’s been promising since launch, or being discouraged by what is very clearly a pay-to-win economy.

There’s no way to know for sure or know if Valve will try to do anything to rectify the situation. It’s still too soon to launch the game for free, as when other paid games have tried, it’s always backfired on them. But it could then try to get a new patch or update out sooner rather than later to get people interested again.

But that’s all speculation on my part.