How Artifact became Valve's biggest failure
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How Artifact became Valve's biggest failure
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Re: How Artifact became Valve's biggest failure
#2They tripled down on the worst part of card games, paying to win.
Re: How Artifact became Valve's biggest failure
#3For me (and I think for most people) this quote from the article summed up why I did not play Artifact:
"However, it seems the biggest issue for Artifact was the pricing structure. First off you had to drop £15.99 to just buy the game, which would give you two starter decks and 10 bonus packs of cards. If you then wanted to get more cards, which would have been necessary if you wanted to build a top level deck unless you got incredibly lucky, you would either have to buy more packs at £1.49, win them in the game modes that require a ticket, which cost £3.75 for a pack of five, to enter, or simply buy the cards from the Steam Marketplace.
But the rarity of the strongest cards such as Axe, "a card you needed in 80 per cent of competitive decks," according to Swim, meant prices shot up. Within two days of launch a single Axe already cost more than the game itself. It felt like you had to put down a lot of money if you wanted to play with a competitive deck in the most competitive modes in the early days."
Re: How Artifact became Valve's biggest failure
#4I'd say not capitalising on one of their greatest games is another huge failure as well..(HL3)
Re: How Artifact became Valve's biggest failure
#5I'd say not capitalising on one of their greatest games is another huge failure as well..(HL3)
Them getting crushed by this is poetic justice of sorts.
Re: How Artifact became Valve's biggest failure
#6I'd say not capitalising on one of their greatest games is another huge failure as well..(HL3)
Not to defend them at all, but the longer it took to plan HL3, the longer it became a sounder business decision to just not do it for risk of not living up to the hype.
Re: How Artifact became Valve's biggest failure
#7I mean, this is exactly how card games work. People don't seem to have an issue buying into expensive Magic decks. You don't NEED to have the best though, no shame in drafting and pauper decks.
Re: How Artifact became Valve's biggest failure
#8I think they did the initial business model wrong, they should've started like hearthstone did, a totally free game with free cards, and the possibility to earn more free cards, and add the steam market later on or control the value early so it doesn't shoots up
Re: How Artifact became Valve's biggest failure
#9I mean, this is exactly how card games work. People don't seem to have an issue buying into expensive Magic decks. You don't NEED to have the best though, no shame in drafting and pauper decks.
People are a lot more willing to dump money on a physical good that they provably own (because it's literally in their possession in their home) than on digital goods.
Artifact uses the microtransaction model to the very extreme, to the point where it costs real money to play a ranked game (not even to get new stuff, just to play a game). This has understandably turned off a huge number of people. With AAA games that have microtransactions, at least your initial outlay is buying a lot, and you don't have to continue putting in money just to play it.
Re: How Artifact became Valve's biggest failure
#10If the price was the only problem, you'd still expect to see people playing draft regularly, at least in the interim, especially since there are free drafts you can play. But there's more wrong with this game than just how they priced it.
It may be that RNG is actually less of a factor in Artifact than in other similar games, but boy does it FEEL stronger. Every turn in a CCG lets you draw cards, and maybe you don't get the card you need, but maybe your opponent didn't also, you don't know, but instantly. But in Artifact, every turn drops creeps in the lanes for both you and your opponent, so you can instantly see if RNG has blessed you or cursed you.
It doesn't even feel great to win when RNG is on your side sometimes. Your opponent has built a huge bruiser in an early lane that will just demolish you there and win the game, except a creep spawns in front of him, blocking all that damage. I mean, I didn't do that, that was just luck. I didn't make a good play or build a good deck to get that one extra turn, I just got lucky with creep spawns.
Sure, there's definitely more around it that got me to that point where I could get lucky, I understand that, but that other work doesn't feel emphasized, the last-second luck does.
And the biggest failure of the Artifact team isn't in the design of this, it's the hubris of not listening to the players complaining about it. It doesn't matter if you build the fairest CCG in the land, if it feels like swingy garbage, nobody's going to play it and it's going to fail. Standing above in their white tower, yelling down "but the math says you're wrong" doesn't matter if nobody's having any fun.