Published , by TJ Denzer
Published , by TJ Denzer
When Artifact launched in 2018, it failed to garner the same praise as other digital card games, pure and simple. The ridiculous complexity, the excessively long game times, the expensive microtransactions, and more just made it a slog compared to the systems of other games, and the player base bled dry as a result. Years later, Valve has finally decided to call it quits on the game. Artifact will be going free-to-play and it will not be receiving any further updates.
Valve announced this news in a developer blog post for Artifact on March 4, 2021. In the post, titled “The Future of Artifact,” Valve stated that while the team put honest effort into a reboot of the game, the player base had not returned in a way that made the effort worthwhile.
“We haven't managed to get the active player numbers to a level that justifies further development at this time,” the post reads. “As such, we've made the tough decision to stop development on the Artifact 2.0 Beta.”
With the above statement in mind, Valve is moving Artifact Classic and the Artifact 2.0 Beta (now renamed Artifact Foundry) towards a fully free-to-play model in their current states. The game will be free to download and play, card packs will no longer be purchasable and all cards will become available to every player in Artifact Classic, cards will be earnable as always in Artifact Foundry, and no card packs, tickets, or further microtransactions will be available from here on out.
In our 2018 review of Artifact, digital card game buff Ozzie Mejia gave Artifact a middling score. Where the main premise, tutorial, and game modes were acceptable, the business model, difficult learning curve, and luck-based microtransactions left the overall consensus a little cold.
It’s worth noting that Artifact also stopped updates in 2019 to start the reboot that would be called Artifact 2.0 and now Artifact Foundry, but this final decision sounds a bit more permanent. Nonetheless, Valve also recognizes that both Artifact and Artifact Foundry still have players, so it would seem the lights will be left on for them for the time being. Otherwise, it’s the end of the road for new Artifact content and updates.