How Artifact was Valve's biggest failure

Artifact is a sad sight. At the time of this writing, there are only 101 players online, and a maximum of 24 hours is not much more - 124 players. There was no news from Valve about the game since May 29, when the company announced that the developers "instead of releasing updates will address the serious problems of the project." Over the past few months, the only activity related to Artifact on Twitch was that users decided to stream movies and porn in the section of this game. Artifact, at least for now, is a dead game, and it can be called the most spectacular failure of Valve.

“Before the release of Artifact, there remained a couple of weeks, and I asked myself: they will not release the game in this state, right?”, Says Sean “Swim” Huguenard.

By that time, Swim had been participating in the closed beta test of Artifact for almost a year, and wrote to the development team “several pages of fairly detailed reviews”. He earned himself a big name in the Gwent world, becoming one of the best deck collectors, and also advised the creators of other games. After the release of Artifact, he planned to take it as a content developer and professional player, aiming to win the $ 1 million prize that Valve had planned for early 2019, and even signed a contract with the e-sports organization Evil Geniuses. That is, in the field of card games, he is much more experienced than most players. But it seems that his reviews and those of other experienced card game players were ignored during beta testing.

“It was a test build, from which you do not expect ideality, but all of us, professionals in card games, saw something in it. She really had a great foundation and great potential, ”says Swim. “But then it began to seem to us that during this period there was practically no change. Many of us communicated with the developers, but this did not lead to any changes, which greatly disappointed us. ”
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Swim is preparing to stream Artifact at one of the first tournaments.

Many closed beta participants found no significant changes. Various little things were improved, changes were made, such as increasing the probability of Drow Ranger, reducing the likelihood of other cards, changing the cost of Cheating Death and Golden Ticket, but in general, the game we played after the release was almost the same as in closed beta, launched about a year before the release.

“By and large, this is true - almost no changes were made to the balance, they were, but there were not so many of them, mainly because the game was very balanced,” says Scaff Elias, an experienced designer of Magic: The Gathering and an employee of the company. Three Donkeys, which was officially a consultant for the Artifact project, but in fact was one of the leading designers. “We did not want to push the community of players to biased opinions, because it reduces the value of testing. Therefore, we let them experiment and at some point they said: “Oh, but this thing is too powerful.” But we for our part knew that this was not the case, because we passed it and played it ourselves. And such situations occurred during the beta all the time. Some said that they didn’t like something, others liked it, there were a lot of conflicting opinions. In the end, the balance, in our view, was very much in line with what we expected from the collectible card game. ”

Balancing elements in beta was not the only aspect in which the development team knew what was right, or at least thought so. She has accumulated a huge amount of data about the game and how people play it, but after the release of the finished game, it turned out that they were very wrong. One of the most serious public complaints about Artifact was related to randomness (RNG) in the game and how it determines the winner and loser in some situations, especially the arrows, which indicate which unit your card will attack. Of course, good players climbed to the top of the ratings, but users complained that at times the games are entirely dependent on the RNG.

“The players had complaints about the problems of the game, but a clear array of information showed that they were wrong,” says Magic: The Gathering author Richard Garfield, who worked as a consultant and then leading designer Artifact. “For example, players complained about a greater share of good luck, but the data show that it all depends much more on skills than in any other digital collectible card game, and this can be seen from Elo's rating to players. For people who complain about the price, the problem lies in the amount of money, but there is also a contrast between black and white, which means that if you want to compete in games like Hearthstone or Magic at the right level, then you have to pay a lot more ".


The arrows that determine who the unit will attack depend on the RNG.

Despite rumors circulating on Reddit, and statements by top players that the RNG is not such an important factor, no definitive proof was provided that this was true, even though there was evidence to prove it. Therefore, many players soon came to terms with the fact that luck will always be an important factor for Artifact and they can do almost nothing with it. Of course, this has turned many users away from the game, although if these data were published, they would be able to change the opinion of the community.

“Valve is committed to ensuring that its marketing is controlled by players,” continues Garfield. “I believe that at a certain stage, control needs to be done independently. They had very positive messages and very correct elements in the design of the game, but many in the gaming community perceived them erroneously. ”

Of course, there were other problems that need to be addressed, and some of them would have become obvious if Artifact had lived longer. Swim says that the original set of cards issued at Artifact was probably not perfect, and could cause problems later. He also notes that after the release of new cards, single-color decks could become the norm, which would essentially destroy one of the most interesting features of the Artifact deck building. We also add the fact that the professional scene had no chance of development, despite the first few tournaments with a decent number of spectators, the lack of a development system and a mobile version. All this makes it clear why users stopped playing.


If the game survived, monochrome decks would become the norm.

However, it seems that the most serious problem Artifact has become the pricing structure. First, the player needed to put out 15.99 pounds in order to simply buy the game, which would give him two starting decks and 10 bonus sets of cards. If he wanted to get more cards, and only new cards or incredible luck are simply needed to build a high-level deck, then you need to buy new sets for 1.49 pounds, win them in game modes, to participate in which you need tickets that sell for 3 , 75 pounds for five pieces, or just buy cards on the Steam Marketplace.

But the strongest cards, for example, Ax, which, according to Swim, are required in 80% of decks for competitive fights, were rare, which led to a rise in prices. Two days after the game was released, one Ax card was already worth more than the game itself. In the early days, there was a feeling that you would have to invest a lot of money if you want to participate with a strong deck in the most competitive modes.

“Obviously, when a buyer complains about this, an error has occurred somewhere,” says Elias. “The mistake may be in marketing, in explaining the game to users, in that they get too little for their money, or that you’ve raised prices too much. There may be a whole bunch of reasons for this error, but it was quite obvious that there is something wrong with this mismatch. I think that the free-to-play game would have better coped with these initial obstacles. ”

“For the price we took from customers, one had to do one of two things. Or reduce prices, or give more resources for it. This seems obvious, but it was necessary to choose from these two options. Increasing the value of resources different games implement in different ways. I mean social interaction, involvement in social media, people find value in this. Specifically for this game, this solution did not fit, I just mean that there are many ways to increase the value of resources in the eyes of the consumer. "


It seemed that in Artifact you have to pay for everything.

Communicating with users would help Artifact at the very beginning (and it seems that Valve took this lesson into account, because now it is active in the Dota Underlords community, that is, the death of Artifact gave us at least something useful), but it is unlikely that it would save the game . The pricing structure was simply too demanding for some players, and even those who invested money in it had an unpleasant aftertaste.

“This is a different model for a card game, and I definitely don’t like that it’s not free, but if they made the other things cheap enough, then maybe everything would be fine,” says Swim. “The need to buy tickets in order to play in other competitive modes above all other expenses seems completely ridiculous. The ticket system was absolutely stupid. I do not understand how she got to the release. I do not think that many blame the designers. It seems to me that a few weeks before the release of the game, someone at the top glanced briefly at Artifact and said: "She should earn more." Someone inside the company made a decision that derailed the whole game. ”

Most likely, we will never know how monetization was discussed at Valve - the company did not respond to our request for an interview, but it is quite obvious that monetization was one of the most important reasons for the failure of Artifact. Elias mentioned that in order to transform the game into free-to-play, it is not enough just to remove the price tag, but at the current stage it seems that if Artifact has a second chance, the only option would be to switch to free-to-play.


Despite the problems, Artifact is still fun to play.

However, neither Garfield nor Elias will work on the transformation of the game. As reported a few months ago, their contract with Valve expired shortly after release and since then they have not worked on the game. Elias said that there was nothing special about this and that his “work was done,” but he and Garfield said that if they were asked to perform the necessary tasks, they would be happy to start working on Artifact again.

Unfortunately, the work that is now required for Artifact will take a long time, and such designers as Garfield and Elias are not really needed for it. And this is assuming that they are working on the game at all. Many members of the community believe that today Artifact may already be dead and doomed forever to be a major failure of Valve.

“Personally, it would be interesting for me to design new games or develop old ones,” says Garfield. “But I do not want to participate in crisis management or think about how to find an audience for this game. I believe that the Artifact foundation is excellent and original, it gives the player something new. Therefore, in this regard, since it has something to offer the user, you can save it. Valve is a smart company and there are a lot of smart people working in it, and I think they can handle it. ”

“But will they do it? It is hard to say".