Valve Gives Up on Artifact 2.0

Three years ago, Valve released their digital trading card game, Artifact, to the world. While nobody could deny that the game had a lot of potential — in fact, reviews often praised the strange lane-based tower-defense nature of the game — the actual gameplay often took a backseat to discussion of the game’s economy. Not only did Artifact cost 20 bucks to play, the only way to get other cards was to either buy card packs with real money, or pay other people real money for their cards, with Valve skimming off the top of that sale. It was a… controversial approach, compared to its free-to-play contemporaries like Hearthstone and Legends of Runeterra, and it did not pay off.

Last year, Valve announced they were going to try to fix up the game in a 2.0 release, changing the game’s economy to be more player-friendly and less… well, overtly money-grabby. But it seems all that hard work didn’t amount to much, because in a new blog post, the Artifact team announced they’re functionally giving up on Artifact.
 

“It's now been about a year and a half since the current Artifact team began work on a reboot in earnest. While we're reasonably satisfied we accomplished most of our game-side goals, we haven't managed to get the active player numbers to a level that justifies further development at this time. As such, we've made the tough decision to stop development on the Artifact 2.0 Beta.

However, we recognize that both versions of Artifact still have players and still have value to the community. For this reason, we're opening both games up to make them available for free to everyone. Final releases of both Artifact Classic and Artifact 2.0 Beta (renamed Artifact Foundry) are now available. Technically Artifact Foundry remains an unfinished product, but most of what's missing is polish and art - the core gameplay is all there. While both games will remain playable, we don’t plan to ship any further gameplay updates.”

So while the game will no longer get updated, it’s still available to play, and it’s possible to get all the cards on-offer without paying anything.

A sad result, but proof that a first impression really is as important as people say. Unless you’re No Man’s Sky, I guess. Or Fallout 76, I hear that’s pretty good now.