Valve Fires Artifact Designers In Recent Lay Offs

It was no secret that Artifact, Valve's own digital battle card game, was not the industry smash hit they were hoping it would be. Now the game company is cutting their losses from the venture, laying off the game's lead designer and terminating the studio's contract.

Valve announced last week that they would be terminating 13 positions at the company. This primarily consisted of hardware related jobs, but it also included Richard Garfield and Skaff Elias. The two operated under their contracting company Three Donkeys and were hired out to develop Artifact.

In an email interaction with Rokman, a writer for Artifact fan site Artibuff, Garfield gives his input on the layoff. He was unsurprised but remains hopeful of the game's future.

"We weren't surprised by the layoff considering how rocky the launch was, the team was enthusiastic about the game and were confident that they had a good product but it became clear it wasn't going to be easy to get the game to where we wanted it.
. . .
Both Skaff and I remain optimistic about the quality of the game and have offered our feedback and advice in an ongoing gratis capacity simply because we would like to see the game do as well as we think it can. We enjoyed working with Valve and I was impressed with their relentless focus on the quality of the game and experience being offered to the player."

To be clear, Artifact isn't dead or abandoned. At least not yet. Valve still has an internal staff team working on the game. But with less than 1,000 players and a Twitter account that hasn't posted since 2018, it's not looking good.

In all fairness, Richard Garfield is the creator of Magic: The Gathering. So if you wanted to make a battle card game, you really can't find a better person to design it. Unfortunately, the game's quality wasn't what fueled its downfall. It was just not a game that the people wanted.

Yet another example of why you can't trust market trends to find success.