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How Artifact became Valve's biggest failure

eurogamer.net

41–50 of 64 posts

Re: How Artifact became Valve's biggest failure

#41
post #37

Nobody asked for a Valve card game. We're all waiting for a '3' of any of their franchises.

"Nobody asked for" is an unproductive meme that gets parroted all too often. No one asked for Half-Life or Portal or DotA or even MtG either.

DotA was a well established Warcraft 3 custom game with the same name before Valve copied it.

Re: How Artifact became Valve's biggest failure

#43
post #41
post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Nobody asked for" is an unproductive meme that gets parroted all too often. No one asked for Half-Life or Portal or DotA or even MtG either.

DotA was a well established Warcraft 3 custom game with the same name before Valve copied it.

Right, DotA was a mod no one asked for.

Portal was actually a similar thing. It started as a student game called Narbacular Drop. Valve hired that team, who turned the concept into Portal.

Likewise they hired Icefrog from DotA to work on DotA 2.

That's a good strategy.

Re: How Artifact became Valve's biggest failure

#44

Commercial failure, perhaps. I'd suggest not delivering Half Life 3 (or even HL2: Episode 3 ) is their biggest failing. All the resources in the world, and they're happy resting on their laurels. It's such a shame.

Indeed there’s no level of success for a narrative FPS big enough to warrant waiting so long on such a valuable IP. Why let the workflow/team get stale?...the answer must be that engineering was rerouted to Steam or porting or something but they could’ve made at least tens of millions * several sequels by now...

Re: How Artifact became Valve's biggest failure

#45

Commercial failure, perhaps. I'd suggest not delivering Half Life 3 (or even HL2: Episode 3 ) is their biggest failing. All the resources in the world, and they're happy resting on their laurels. It's such a shame.

Valve has very little reason to make a single player game. Why make hl3 while someone else can make a similar selling game and you taking 30% of it? A game like artifact is more appealing to them because it has a potential to become next hearthstone, which is much more profitable than a single player game that only sells once

Also hype around hl3 is too much, it will be below expectations no matter how much hard Valve tries.

Re: How Artifact became Valve's biggest failure

#46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Standing above in their white tower, yelling down "but the math says you're wrong" doesn't matter if nobody's having any fun. Even Wizards of the Coast (WotC) struggles with this in Magic: the Gathering, and that game has been around for over 25 years and remains King of the paper TCGs. Counterspells, discard, and land destruction are all very balanced effects, but a plurality of the players hate them so much that…

> Making something balanced and competitive, though necessary, are secondary to the enjoyment of the game. That's generally not true today, where 'organic' marketing driven by professional streamers is a large part of potential players' initial exposure to a game. Streamers can easily kill a game in its infancy simply by providing negative feedback (as we're seeing here). But the pro players will only commit if they…

If that were true, then chess and go would be the most streamed games on Twitch. If that were true, then Apex and PUBG would have beaten Fortnite for popularity.

Streamers are great advertisers, but players are your customers.

Re: How Artifact became Valve's biggest failure

#47

Commercial failure, perhaps. I'd suggest not delivering Half Life 3 (or even HL2: Episode 3 ) is their biggest failing. All the resources in the world, and they're happy resting on their laurels. It's such a shame.

They don't know how to make it "special". They don't want to make just a good game, they want to make something exceptional and they don't know how.

Re: How Artifact became Valve's biggest failure

#48
post #44

Commercial failure, perhaps. I'd suggest not delivering Half Life 3 (or even HL2: Episode 3 ) is their biggest failing. All the resources in the world, and they're happy resting on their laurels. It's such a shame.

Indeed there’s no level of success for a narrative FPS big enough to warrant waiting so long on such a valuable IP. Why let the workflow/team get stale?...the answer must be that engineering was rerouted to Steam or porting or something but they could’ve made at least tens of millions * several sequels by now...

tens of millions ... is what you make _in a month_ by selling hats inside free to play game. Valve has precisely zero incentive to make any game except for concepts centered around selling digital property, coincidentally like a computer card game!

Re: How Artifact became Valve's biggest failure

#49
post #44

Commercial failure, perhaps. I'd suggest not delivering Half Life 3 (or even HL2: Episode 3 ) is their biggest failing. All the resources in the world, and they're happy resting on their laurels. It's such a shame.

Indeed there’s no level of success for a narrative FPS big enough to warrant waiting so long on such a valuable IP. Why let the workflow/team get stale?...the answer must be that engineering was rerouted to Steam or porting or something but they could’ve made at least tens of millions * several sequels by now...

When you control a near-monopoly App Store and can take 30% of revenue from so many successful developers, there’s little incentive to actually make ambitious games

Steam is hundreds of times more profitable than any game could ever be.

Re: How Artifact became Valve's biggest failure

#50
For me, their business model was the biggest turn-off, I didn't even give it a try because of that.

Hearthstone is already strong in this market, they have $0 entry fee and only charge for the cards. It's a pay2win game, some like/accept it, and some don't. I don't. Because I'm not willing to pay some unknown amount of money for a game just to stay competitive everytime the meta changes. I play games for fun, and being destroyed in a game because of IRL money is no fun.

Now what I would consider as a strong alternative to Hearthstone, would be a game asking for a triple-A entry fee, and then charging nothing extra. In this game everyone would have the same chances, and nobody would have to feel bad just because they didn't invest enough money in a gambling scheme.

What Valve offered is a triple-A entry fee, and then charging for anything they can. Now how is this can ever be a good offer? I don't know. I simply ignored the game and moved on.

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