After years of laying dormant without releasing new games, Valve released Artifact last year, a free-to-play digital collectible card game designed by the mind behind Magic: The Gathering, Richard Garfield. However, unlike most other Valve ventures, the game has failed to gain any traction among fans, with daily player numbers being at an abysmal place, currently peaking at around 350 players.
Valve today released a blog post titled "Towards A Better Artifact" where it admitted the game has not done so well, saying "Artifact represents the largest discrepancy between our expectations for how one of our games would be received and the actual outcome." And now, the company is essentially going back to the drawing board with the title.
Valve elaborated that it came to this decision after seeing how players interacted with the game, and had found "there are deep-rooted issues" that cannot be resolved using the company"s original plan to release new cards and features as regular updates.
Instead, the company has decided to "re-examine" Artifact"s game design, economy, and social experience, among other aspects, which it expects to take "a significant amount of time." Richard Garfield was also let go from the project recently, so we could see a completely different game come out at the end of this.
As such, Valve confirmed that this pivot will draw its attention away from pumping out updates to Artifact in its current state, which is bad news to the few who are still playing the game.
In other Valve news, the company also quietly revealed a new VR headset today, the Index.