Valve has addressed and admitted that its digital card game Artifact has not turned out how to company hoped for. The game is based on Dota 2 and despite praise for its complexity and depth, the game’s launch back in November of last year failed to impress players.
Valve has acknowledged that things have gone very wrong and that the game has ‘deeply rooted issues’. It also added that the it now plans to stop on shipping update for Artifact and instead focus on the larger issues of the game.
When we launched Artifact, we expected it would be the beginning of a long journey, that it would lay the foundation for years to come. Our plan was to immediately dive into our normal strategy of shipping a series of updates driven by the dialogue community members were having with each other and with us.
Obviously, things didn’t turn out how we hoped. Artifact represents the largest discrepancy between our expectations for how one of our games would be received and the actual outcome. But we don’t think that players misunderstand our game, or that they’re playing it wrong. Artifact now represents an opportunity for us to improve our craft and use that knowledge to build better games.
Valve also stated that it has been looking at the game very carefully since its launch, and how the players interact with the game as well as gathering feedback. it had become clear that there are deep rooted issues with the game and that their original update strategy of releasing new features and cards would be insufficient to address them.
Valve also noted how they plan to work on the issues in the future,
Moving forward, we’ll be heads-down focusing on addressing these larger issues instead of shipping updates. While we expect this process of experimentation and development to take a significant amount of time, we’re excited to tackle this challenge and will get back to you as soon as we are ready.
Have you played Artifact? What do you think of the game? let us know in the comments below.
