Valve announced that Artifact is not bringing enough players to continue investing more time and resources into the redesign of the game. Valve will no longer offer new updates for the game.
Artifact, the Dota 2 card game, released in November of 2018 and sold relatively well, however, players did not like the pay-to-play mechanics implemented in the game. The game received a decent 76 score on Metacritic, on Steam the reviews are mostly negative and it’s the main cause behind the game’s unfortunate end.
Similar to Electronic Arts’ Anthem, Artifact was being redesigned in an attempt to increase player count. The plans were to make a full reevaluation of the game’s mechanics and economy.
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.
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.
Here’s an overview of the final changes to Artifact Classic:
- The game is free for everyone to play.
- All players get every card for free. You will no longer be able to buy card packs.
- Paid players’ existing cards have been converted into special Collector’s Edition versions, which will remain marketable. Marketplace integration has been removed from the game.
- Paid event tickets have been removed.
- Customers who paid for the game will still earn packs of Collector’s Edition cards for playing; players who got the game for free will not.
Final changes to Artifact Foundry:
- The game is free for everyone to play.
- Players gain access to cards by playing the game. All cards are earned this way; no cards or packs will be for sale and Artifact Foundry cards are not marketable.
- All final card art that was in the pipeline is now in the game.
Stay tuned at Gaming Instincts via Twitter, YouTube, and Facebook for more gaming news.
