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Death of a Game: Artifact

jdmc13

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Mar 14, 2019
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While I've never played Artifact, I'll admit to being curious about how quickly it came apart. After watching the video, I'm kind of surprised that Richard Garfield seemed to never admit there were any problems with the core game. My assumption would be that no matter how bad the presentation was, if the core game was good, people would still play it.
 

Deleted member 864

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I watched it earlier and it's another great video from him.

I love this series, I'm always excited when a new one releases.
 
Sargerus

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Ouch. Surprised this still hasn't gone F2P.
 
Etrian Darkness

Etrian Darkness

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I don't think there was a market for a brand new IP real money digital card game and people didn't want to buy into it.

It having a price entry to get in probably didn't help it at all. I wonder if they'll try and save it in the future.
 
kubev

kubev

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I bought nearly every card for Artifact, so I was really bummed when it was apparent that the game was dying. It's a shame, because it's such a cool game.
 
cakely

cakely

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Bought it, enjoyed it.
The matches were fun but a bit long and they were typically pretty sweaty.

Sorry to see it go.
 
TheClaw7667

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I really hope Valve tries to salvage it as I found the gameplay to be very enjoyable as someone not that into card games.
 

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They should just buy out Abrakam for $1 and put money into Faeria and reboot that. At least Faeria was a good game, they just had no money and no business sense.
 
eonden

eonden

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NKnight7 said:
I watched it earlier and it's another great video from him.

I love this series, I'm always excited when a new one releases.
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Great series, love his takes on the different MMOs, you can tell how he was invested in a ton of them but he can see their issues.

Also, guys lets wait until Artifact 2.0 happens, they promised it
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Lunaray

Lunaray

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Oct 27, 2017
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So I finished the video. Honestly, I strongly believe Valve could have still maintained a concurrent player count in Artifact in the thousands IF they had supported the game with any updates at all since December 2018. I thought it was a shame they didn't think a moderate successful game was worth supporting, because I fully believe that was possible with Artifact. Some games are just not for everyone, no matter how much QOL improvements you make to it.
 
Qvoth

Qvoth

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imo they blew their chance with underlords as well, lots of underlords streamers already stopped playing it
 
MajesticSoup

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Acinixys said:
They totally fucked up by not making it F2P with paid packs from the start

Hearthstone has got the model locked down
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Guy must've used this PhD in math to figure out that $20 is more than $0 and therefore will make more money.

Also I dont think a card game no matter how good can be pc only. Needs to launch on ios and android as well.
 
Luminish

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I don't know if any other multiplayer game flopped so hard so fast from the initial playerbase. Artifact probably deserves more attention just for that achievement.

Those Garfield quotes about the players being wrong is telling how little he was thinking about making the game fun and accessable. Yes, it's technically true a competitive black deck is slightly cheaper relatively to hearthstone, but maybe consider what if players want to play a blue combo or a red smork deck but don't want to pay $100 to do so. And it's technically true that managing RNG is where the skill in card games actually comes from, but maybe consider how that RNG feels as a player in the moment it happens and not as a designer looking at aggregate ELO data.

Personally I hated market based pricing for individual cards the most. The best thing about Hearthstone's monetization is the best and worst legendary card costs the exact same amount. Sure, that sucks for the whales who want a complete collection, but for most everyone else it made getting over that first hump to your first and most wanted competitive deck so much easier.

So the least fun of the third tier decks was maybe cheaper than a competitive hearthstone deck, and the complete collection of cards was certainly cheaper than a hearthstone complete collection, but they're only cheap because no one wants them. That's literally what marketplace pricing is.
 
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Moebius

Moebius

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Oct 28, 2017
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Artifact was fun. It wasn't the best card game I'd ever played but it was interesting. I hope they can release a version 2 that is amazing.
 
SubvertedTrope

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By the way, card game enthusiasts and whoever else, in march the closed beta for Legends of Runeterra starts, sign up for a key today!

It's an actually very good card game! And apparently the monetization was well received, but I wouldn't know cause beta has a lot unlocked.

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Nome

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Neat video. Seems their insistence on hooking into the Steam marketplace and demolishing their new user funnel by charging a $20 entry fee really cemented that it was a big cash grab.
 
Rover

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I was an enthusiastic early adopter of Artifact, and I still have a lot of thoughts about the game over a year out now (and RIP to it).

Let me just say that Artifact is a weird, enjoyable game, with some flaws. While this video did a pretty good job of summarizing what Artifact was, I think it was pretty unfair about laying the design problems at Richard Garfield's feet.

First of all, Garfield was completely in his right to not stay and "fix the game." His contract expired, and CCG designers typically do not stay on their game to keep working on it. Designing and balancing a continuing game like that is not a one-person job, and there are many past examples of other talented designers stepping in to take the lead on various CCGs. Valve could have addressed the game's issues in a number of ways, on their own, without really changing much of the foundations designed by Garfield. If they weren't equipped to fix it themselves, it makes Valve look like they simply didn't put the necessary resources behind this game to begin with.

And then, the "real money for cards" thing...

I think a lot of the trepidation and anguish about buying/selling Artifact's cards on the Steam Market could be blamed on the Steam Market itself - specifically that nobody understands what the fuck Valve's Steam Market actually is. I don't blame them, because Valve sends a lot of mixed messaging and unclear instruction about what you do with the Steam market and what that money is.

When that market first debuted on Steam, I thought "certainly nobody is paying actual money to buy these stupid trading cards, right?". I still don't know the answer to that, but by now I assume all those transactions are people paying for random Steam novelties with store credit - i.e. Steam bucks they got from selling their own Steam novelties. That's what I would just call, "trading,", and the dollar value is there as an index on what any given thing is worth in relation to another.

What Artifact was trying to do with allowing players to trade cards on the market seemed like it could work, but the market is confusing and it seems to me like people negatively associated the $20 they paid for the game with the value they were trading on the Steam market via the cards. So if you 'lost money' in those transactions somehow, it was like you were getting your $20 buy-in taken away. (It wasn't)

I mean, it's one of the many confusing messages that Valve communicated about this game, and I just don't know if Valve - the company - was ready to undertake what this needed to be successful.
 
i hate cheaters

i hate cheaters

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Feb 16, 2018
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i bought a lot of artifact cards

i saw a lot of potential in the game and liked a lot of the design, but i wanted to play constructed with 10 sets, not just 1

idk if they expected limited to hold interest until the game got to that point, but the limited was really mediocre imo. not as bad as hearthstone & hearthstone clones, but a lot worse than magic & magic clones
 
Rover

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Nome said:
Neat video. Seems their insistence on hooking into the Steam marketplace and demolishing their new user funnel by charging a $20 entry fee really cemented that it was a big cash grab.
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Of the issues I ultimately had with Artifact, I had no problem paying $20 for a videogame, or the equivalent of a decent starter pack in a paper card game or board game. I still don't even really regret the $20 today, despite the game dying. The "entry fee" thing is really blown out of proportion, IMO - I don't believe every card game has to be F2P, especially if it's trying something different. But I'm coming at it from someone who regularly pays a lot of money (like 40 to sometimes 100 dollars) for tabletop games, and was never too engaged by Hearthstone or the dozens of clones of it.
 
xyla

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I loved so much about that game - it's a shame the whole conversation happened around the 20$ entry and the cards you had to buy.

Being able to play a complete draft with friends for 0 money would have been awesome, even if you were not able to keep the cards.

The gameplay itself was pretty cool too - there were too many spells that simply changed stats but overall there was a lot of direction to grow.

Hopefully it comes back - I'd like to play it again and I'm sure if they somehow manage to make it economy/market based but still f2p it would find it's success this time.
 
Nome

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Rover said:
Of the issues I ultimately had with Artifact, I had no problem paying $20 for a videogame, or the equivalent of a decent starter pack in a paper card game or board game. I still don't even really regret the $20 today, despite the game dying. The "entry fee" thing is really blown out of proportion, IMO - I don't believe every card game has to be F2P, especially if it's trying something different. But I'm coming at it from someone who regularly pays a lot of money (like 40 to sometimes 100 dollars) for tabletop games, and was never too engaged by Hearthstone or the dozens of clones of it.
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It's more of a business criticism. What I'm saying is that instead of opening up the funnel and making the game F2P, because they were so insistent on the marketplace integration, they were forced to charge an entry fee. Given that the game has a population problem, this is one of the decisions that did them in, as user acquisition for a paid product is very different (harder!) than F2P. Also, the entire thing just seems ethically unsound to me.
 
Lyng

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crazyfunster said:
They should just buy out Abrakam for $1 and put money into Faeria and reboot that. At least Faeria was a good game, they just had no money and no business sense.
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faeria is, much like Artifact, a fantastic card game. And both where much cheaper to be competitive in than magic and hearthstone. But for some reason the players got hung up on entry fees and the fact that these where long, complex and non-mobile games meant the hearthstone casual players checked out right away.
 
Rover

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Nome said:
It's more of a business criticism. What I'm saying is that instead of opening up the funnel and making the game F2P, because they were so insistent on the marketplace integration, they were forced to charge an entry fee. Given that the game has a population problem, this is one of the decisions that did them in, as user acquisition for a paid product is very different (harder!) than F2P. Also, the entire thing just seems ethically unsound to me.
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Why ethically unsound?

For what it's worth, they used to charge for TF2 before making it F2P, and it got (at least, it seems to me) like a very good playerbase from that.

Again, as a tabletop gamer, I think people will gladly pay for card games if they're good. I don't know if Artifact was unfairly dragged by the shouts of people who insisted it must be F2P - but I also have to admit that the game was not exactly a crowd-pleaser either. It's a harder game with more of a niche appeal. It may have never, ever gathered popular support by being F2P.

It's hard to say what really happened at this point, but I do agree generally that Valve didn't know how to market this game.
 
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Nome

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Rover said:
Why ethically unsound?

For what it's worth, they used to charge for TF2 before making it F2P, and it got (at least, it seems to me) like a very good playerbase from that.

Again, as a tabletop gamer, I think people will gladly pay for card games if they're good. I don't know if Artifact was unfairly dragged by the shouts of people who insisted it must be F2P - but I also have to admit that the game was not exactly a crowd-pleaser either. It's hard to say what really happened at this point, but I do agree generally that Valve didn't know how to market this game.
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TF2 was a boxed product bundled with two other fantastic games. It also launched at a time before F2P was considered "premium" and common in the West. That aside, a general rule is that if you're going to build a game with a high LTV (lifetime value; average lifetime spend per user), you want to open up the funnel as wide as possible to benefit from as many users contributing to your revenue. If you constrict that funnel with an entry fee, you're fucking yourself. Valve isn't stupid--they knew this. Which means they either were so greedy for that marketplace "tax" that they didn't care, or they grossly overestimated how enthusiastic their playerbase would be for the game.

EDIT: sorry, forgot to mention why it's ethically unsound. Second edit incoming.
EDIT2: it's unethical because Valve controls the marketplace and the drop rates. This allows them to effectively manipulate the secondhand market by making adjustments to drop rates.
 
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Rover

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Nome said:
TF2 was a boxed product bundled with two other fantastic games. It also launched at a time before F2P was considered "premium" and common in the West. That aside, a general rule is that if you're going to build a game with a high LTV (lifetime value; average lifetime spend per user), you want to open up the funnel as wide as possible to benefit from as many users contributing to your revenue. If you constrict that funnel with an entry fee, you're fucking yourself. Valve isn't stupid--they knew this. Which means they either were so greedy for that marketplace "tax" that they didn't care, or they grossly overestimated how enthusiastic their playerbase would be for the game.
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I don't wanna derail with TF2 but IIRC I paid $20 for it separately, no Orange Box (on PC).

I think you make a fair point about wanting as many players in the funnel. I just disagree that the entry fee was necessarily a bad thing. I guess what I'm trying to say is, if Garfield designed a good card game and Valve had a content and business plan for it that made sense (whether or not that includes tradeable cards, marketplace integration, random drops, etc.) and it seemed viable long-term, I don't see a problem with charging $20 for that. It's a game and good games do get a playerbase, and if they financially make sense, they can continue to run.

And let me add that I don't think your reasoning is wrong, either, it's perhaps two different ways of thinking about it, or two different gambles.

However, there are a lot of signs, in both the lead up and the wind down of this game, that seem to show Valve had no idea what they were doing, who this was for, what it was going to pan out to, etc.
 
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Hassansan

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I feel like when it comes to monetization, Valve should've tried what Runeterra is doing and undercut other card games with a much better new ways to earn cards instead of the whole pack opening, The market is very full and undercutting other games is the way to go imo.

In my dream land, I like to think Valve has made Reynard's The Bazaar which is a card game with only cosmetic purchases, that system would've made a big splash and is very fitting for a big studio because they can make much more flashy cosmetics and it would come out in a fast/steady pace, it just such a good fit.

But instead, we got a worst version of the physical tcg's.
 
Nome

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Rover said:
I don't wanna derail with TF2 but IIRC I paid $20 for it separately, no Orange Box (on PC).

I think you make a fair point about wanting as many players in the funnel. I just disagree that the entry fee was necessarily a bad thing. I guess what I'm trying to say is, if Garfield designed a good card game and Valve had a content and business plan for it that made sense (whether or not that includes tradeable cards, marketplace integration, random drops, etc.) and it seemed viable long-term, I don't see a problem with charging $20 for that. It's a game and good games do get a playerbase, and if they financially make sense, they can continue to run.

However, there are a lot of signs, in both the lead up and the wind down of this game, that seem to show Valve had no idea what they were doing, who this was for, what it was going to pan out to, etc.
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I edited my previous post, check it out with regards to ethics.
Anyway, I'm speaking purely from a business standpoint. I agree from a craftsmanship perspective, it's totally fine to charge $20 for a good game (or even a non-good game). But given the genre and the market leader, they kind of set themselves up for failure. Like the video says, it's not that the entry fee was to validate the craftsmanship--it was there to protect the marketplace economy. After all, Dota 2, a game with much more content and much greater development investment, is truly F2P.

Ultimately I think it was a big money gamble for them. Some product manager there probably crunched the numbers and figured that a lower population due to the entry fee would be worth it if they could recoup the revenue from long term marketplace taxation. If the game caught on, it would've made them millions.
 
Rover

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Nome said:
I edited my previous post, check it out with regards to ethics.
Anyway, I'm speaking purely from a business standpoint. I agree from a craftsmanship perspective, it's totally fine to charge $20 for a good game (or even a non-good game). But given the genre and the market leader, they kind of set themselves up for failure. Like the video says, it's not that the entry fee was to validate the craftsmanship--it was there to protect the marketplace economy. After all, Dota 2, a game with much more content and much greater development investment, is truly F2P.

Ultimately I think it was a big money gamble for them. Some product manager there probably crunched the numbers and figured that a lower population due to the entry fee would be worth it if they could recoup the revenue from long term marketplace taxation. If the game caught on, it would've made them millions.
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To be honest I don't understand (or got the impression) that the $20 was to protect the marketplace economy. Many players pulled cards from their starting boosters that sold on the market place for more than the $20 asking price. I figure that maybe that's the appeal - "see if you get lucky and pull a great rare" but it seems like card values generated out of thin air.

It also seems a bit troubling, for the health of the game, to ask your players to either keep your rare card and play the game, or sell it, cash out, and never go back to the game because you gave up your good cards and wont be able to compete.
 

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headfallsoff said:


Gonna watch and enjoy this detailed breakdown but I feel like this is really all you need.
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Imagine this very same announcement, but at the end it said 'The Dota RPG' instead of 'The Dota Card Game'. The reaction would be way different. A hack-n-slash rpg in the vein of Diablo with Dota 2 heroes would be incredible.
 
Rover

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Nome said:
EDIT: sorry, forgot to mention why it's ethically unsound. Second edit incoming.
EDIT2: it's unethical because Valve controls the marketplace and the drop rates. This allows them to effectively manipulate the secondhand market by making adjustments to drop rates.
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That's true, they do control the drop rates, but I take it that the market prices are user-driven and basic supply-demand. No idea what drove the prices so early on besides certain cards being "the good cards" though.

What I don't really get is - how much of the money is "real" and what is essentially store credit from other sources on the steam market?
 
Nome

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Rover said:
To be honest I don't understand (or got the impression) that the $20 was to protect the marketplace economy. Many players pulled cards from their starting boosters that sold on the market place for more than the $20 asking price. I figure that maybe that's the appeal - "see if you get lucky and pull a great rare" but it seems like card values generated out of thin air.

It also seems a bit troubling, for the health of the game, to ask your players to either keep your rare card and play the game, or sell it, cash out, and never go back to the game because you gave up your good cards and wont be able to compete.
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The $20 entry fee prevents players from making F2P accounts, opening packs, and then selling them on the marketplace. It basically prevents inflation. I'm sure someone who understands economics better than me can explain better.

Rover said:
That's true, they do control the drop rates, but I take it that the market prices are user-driven and basic supply-demand. No idea what drove the prices so early on besides certain cards being "the good cards" though.

What I don't really get is - how much of the money is "real" and what is essentially store credit from other sources on the steam market?
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Prices are determined by users, but they're still generally a function of things that Valve controls. Something that I always emphasize with regards to drop rates (partly because I've worked extensively with loot boxes and similar mechanics) is that you should never assume simple drop rates (e.g. flat X% chance to get object Y). There's usually a lot of other stuff going on under the hood. This goes double when it's an "open" economy like the Steam marketplace where real money is involved, and none of that is exposed to the user.
 
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