Valve’s Card Game Artifact Player Figures Have Bombed

Artifact

Last November Valve finally released Artifact. The game, for those of you unfamiliar, looked to replicate the success of releases such as Hearthstone by providing a collectable online card playing game. It seems, however, that despite a lot of initial success on the launch, Valve may have entered the party a little too late.

In a report via Kotaku, Steam player figure reports would seem to indicate that the player base for the game has completely tanked.

Player Base Disappears

On it’s launch in November, Artifact was reported to have had around 60,740 concurrent players. A pretty decent figure for a game of this time. Last month, however, these figures dipped below 1,500. In other words, the player based of the game has dropped (in less than 2 months) by over 97.5%!

Just to put this into context, it’s achieving concurrent player figures similar to those seen in Dark Souls 2. A game that was released (even in it’s most recent form) over 3 years ago!

Why Has It Tanked?

I do not profess to be an expert in online card-playing games, but throughout 2018, the market did seem to have hit a peak point. As such, I suspect that while Artifact might in itself be a perfectly acceptable game, it simply arrived at a point where players already had their established games and didn’t particularly fancy side-tracking into another.

Overall, however, it’s all rather grim news for Valve. Particularly given that this was one of their most significant releases for some time. Consider though that the game is now genuinely at a point where finding an opponent may not be easy. This tells you everything you need to know. This clearly hasn’t gone down well with a pretty popular market. Remember, again, this isn’t even 2 months old yet!

What do you think? Did you play Artifact? What did you think of the game? – Let us know in the comments!