I think Artifact is fundamentally an excellent game, and the current audience for it nowhere nearly reflects the potential audience it could have. Sure it is niche, sure it is long & dry & mathy… but it is The Dota Card Game, and that game is vastly more painful and inaccessible yet still maintains one of the biggest audiences in gaming.
To say Artifact is merely a bad game is to dismiss outright the uncountable amount of errors Valve made to alienate damn near everyone who could have loved the game and stuck with it, even those who bought it day one with all the cards (me) and are no longer playing it until Valve actually does something. At this point, there isn’t even a consistent litany of sticking complaints on the subreddit. I will make an effort to itemize, from my view, all the ways Valve fucked up. I will not even be able to collect them all at one go so I’ll probably come back and add to this post (edit: actually fuck that).
— The game should not have had a $20 entry fee. I can (and have) come up with a number of rationalizations for the fee based on what you get for the $20 (packs and tickets and most importantly unlimited free draft play), but I cannot expect anyone to care when every other card game is at least free to try. Even though the people who bought the game quickly dropped it too (due to the other issues I’m getting to), I still think this is the most alienating factor and I have no doubt Valve will remove the upfront cost regardless of whatever else they do, if they ever decide to do anything.
I personally bought the game for two friends who were disinclined from spending $20 to try it, and they were surprised by how fun they found it, but even when you’ve got your foot in the door there’s not much else to look forward to as we move down the list.
— The ticket system. It costs $1 per event ticket which enables you to play the “prized modes”: a run to 5 wins or 2 losses. Win 3 before two losses and you get your ticket back, 4 and you get your ticket and a pack, 5 and you get your ticket and 2 packs. Packs are notionally worth $2 each (their EV is actually much lower now given the severely depressed state of the card market, but whatever) so basically you’re wagering $1 in the hope of earning $4 profit (in the form of cards, which you can sell for Steambux).
I think the option of betting money on your performance is awesome, and Magic: The Gathering players are well used to $15 draft runs every friday night worldwide. The monetization decisions behind Artifact would, at face value, make a lot of sense to Magic: The Gathering players (if we accept the debatable notion that Magic players want to invest in any card game other than Magic). It’s too bad then that Valve made SWEET FUCK-ALL EFFORT to actually make paper Magic players aware of the existence of Artifact, much less to care about it. I had personally embarrassed myself by mentioning Artifact at Friday Night Magic multiple times, and nobody had ever heard of it. I guess Valve just wanted people like me to do it for free.
Anyway, the ticket system and “prized modes” as they are, are so appallingly messaged that they read as a “repeating micro-paywall for ranked play” (strictly speaking there is no ranked play), rather than optionally anteing a dollar on your performance. Valve did everything wrong in messaging this concept and thus inadvertently created the “pay to pay to play” meme that condemned the game. They even called the free mode “Casual” and the paid mode “Expert”, which even they realized (too late) was damagingly stupid and thus renamed them to “Standard” and “Prized” play. I think they could have made this concept work without any functional difference (just for theory’s sake) by not visibly segregating the modes (since “free” and “paid” modes are not any different to play aside from the ante), and instead just offering Constructed and Draft with a non-assuming checkbox beneath called “Ante for Prizes” or something, which does silently split you off into a different matchmaking pool. They needed to have “Free” seem like the default, but they fucked up and made “Paid” seem like the default.
It’s impossible to say whether they were greedy or just deluded. At any rate, the vast majority of the money going into tickets for Prized Play is ultimately exchanged between players. Someone did the math and it appears Valve takes a 10% rake, which isn’t so bad compared to the 100% rake of Hearthstone or whatever, but Valve sure as hell didn’t convince anyone of that.
— Virtually no social features at launch and all they added afterwards was a limited opt-in text chat and emote system. They advertised Artifact as a social-minded game intending to capture the feel of kitchen table Magic, and they totally underdelivered. There is no way to search for communities or publicly-run tournaments within the game; the matchmaking experience is the core of the game and is just as impersonal and asocial as Hearthstone. The customization options for private matches with friends are by far better than any other digital card game, but you will not actually make friends playing Artifact because they fucked up that whole feel (there aren’t even general chat lobbies, whereas in Dota 2 they have per-town regional chat lobbies greeting you on the main page), and the options are lacking in crucial modes such as 1v1 draft play and cube drafting (making a custom draft pool out of the cards you own).
— No hamster wheel bullshit = “no reason to play the game”. The game is severely lacking in psychological blackmail to keep people logging in for Daily Quests and filling up bars and grinding cards at the converted rate of 30 cents an hour. They slapped in a bandaid progression system that you could unlock a few packs and lame avatars with, but nobody cared, especially when it doesn’t have the brilliantly seductive presentation of Hearthstone which has made even me a lifestyle slave to it.
But for real, they should have unlockable cosmetics or something. Or just make all cards free and what’s marketed are the PREMIUM COSMETIC versions of the cards, which you can optionally grind for at that awful rate that people love so much, as Hearthstone has proven.
Hearthstone is not successful because it is a great game (I think it’s pretty good for what it is though, which is how I cope with having spent $1100 and counting on it). Hearthstone is successful because it knows how to keep people hooked, in all the worst but most effective ways. Artifact could have had a more ethical (or at least generous) form of grind-reward maybe, but instead they opted for nothing at all, and thus so many in turn opted not to play the game in favor of those which exploit them better.
With the absence of social features and the absence of a ladder, most people really are left with no reason to play the game. You can’t make friends, you can’t be #1 Ranked Legend, and you can’t even make money off the game anymore (which was, for a time, perceived as the game’s most ironically redeeming feature).
— No communication from Valve. No roadmap. This shit does not fly anymore. People are always willing to leap to the defense of “That’s just how Valve does things”, but they say that in regard to games that already have humble (and free) roots and an airtight fanbase that wouldn’t consider playing another game besides CS:GO or Dota 2 or TF2, no matter what neglect they faced. It will not work for any new and untested Game as a Service. Even Magic: The Gathering’s head designer Mark Rosewater frequently answers any fan’s questions and the rest of the staff publish lengthy blog entries explaining their decisions. Valve are not more privileged than Wizards of the Coast when it comes to card games. Valve needs to Get Real. Also that $1,000,000 first prize tournament they slated for Q1 2019 and big-upped prior to the release of the game is apparently not happening and they haven’t said anything, go figure.
