Valve abandons Artifact development

A few days ago we heard that BioWare was dropping Anthem development after quite a few months of working on a new version of the game that would appeal to the players. Now it's the turn of Valve's collectible card game Artifact. The game was announced as the new and revolutionary promise from the company, which was developed with the help of Richard Garfield, the creator of Magic: The Gathering. The game features an innovative gameplay system that allows you to deploy cards from your deck across three different boards in order to destroy your opponent, but its learning curve was a bit too steep for most people. Valve's popular MOBA DOTA 2 was the inspiration for the game, and that also boosted its initial sales, but the number of people playing Artifact dramatically decreased in just a few weeks, anticipating a bad outcome for the game. 

A few months later, Gabe Newell himself talked about Artifact 2.0, a revamped version of the game that would turn it into what players wanted, and a closed beta of the new version started in 2020. But it seems that there are quite fewer people interested in the game than they expected and the company is abandoning the game. 

"While we're reasonably satisfied we accomplished most of our game-side goals, we haven't managed to get the active player numbers to a level that justifies further development at this time. As such, we've made the tough decision to stop development on the Artifact 2.0 Beta."

But there is no reason to be sad if you bought the game because you will be able to continue playing it without any problems. In fact, both the old and the revamped version of Artifact are already available to everyone on Steam. They are called Artifact Classic and Artifact Foundry. You can download and play them completely free, and they give you access to all the cards in the game.

If you want to play a different collectible card game, Artifact is worth giving a try, especially on its most recent form. If not, you can continue playing other popular games in the genre, like Hearthstone, Slay the Spire, Gwent, MTG Arena, and more.