
How Artifact became Valve's biggest failure - elemeno
https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2019-07-03-how-artifact-became-valves-biggest-failure
======
kmnc
I played the game a lot, before giving up. I played only draft and was pretty
good (Mostly infinite and highly ranked).

I have two opinions on why the game failed. First, while it was a truly
satisfying game and wonderfully complex the random elements where both anti
Dota and truly fuck you rng where a flip of a coin decides most high level
games. Now, the same could be said about most competitive card games but in
Artifact it was so visible, felt terrible, and had no ways to play around it.
Hearthstone has learned that good rng is about having a range of bad medium to
good results. In Artifact it was as either game losing or game winning, every
time. Terrible design and in my opinion the game could of removed all rng
entirely and it would of been an amazing niche competitive game. The problem
though is, the ranking system, tournaments, and pay to play economy made
competitive play boring with no rewards. I am not exaggerating when I say the
game would of not been a failure if it had a solid visible Elo ranking system.

Second opinion: the entire design philosophy was a failure from day one. Dota
has over 100 heros. Imagine a hearthstone style game were on day one you had
100 heroes to choose from, each with their own cards added to your deck and
having four skills (like hero powers in hearthstone). Games remain fast while
still being complex and keeping the spirit of Dota (100s of options). I
believe valve has no clue what their audience wants.

~~~
Reedx
> I believe valve has no clue what their audience wants.

Maybe that's the problem - if they were trying to make something they think
the audience wants. The audience itself doesn't know what it wants, let alone
anyone removed from it making guesses on their behalf.

The audience didn't know they wanted DotA or Minecraft until they were made.

~~~
MauranKilom
The point about Minecraft is valid, but DotA grew incrementally over such a
long time (and with such a heritage) that it is very clear the audience was
more involved in its making than any single developer.

------
DanHulton
If 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.

~~~
asdjlkadsjklads
> If 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.

Fwiw, price _was_ my only problem and i still stopped playing. Why? Because it
felt the game's intentions differed from mine. It felt like the game was
trying to be Magic, where as i just wanted to play a card-dota _game_ \- not
invest in some market, continually buying packs, etc.

In addition to this, the drama and complaints surrounding the market also made
me feel like the game was doomed for failure. And the type of game it was made
me not want to play it if it died _(unlike a single player game, where i 'd
happily play regardless of other people)_.

Just my 2c / context.

~~~
DanHulton
Yeah, I'm not saying it wasn't a problem for anyone, but that there should be
a solid core of people playing drafts (free or otherwise) if the base game
itself was legitimately great, since the pricing issue effectively goes away
there. Maybe it would still keep _you_ away, but it shouldn't have kept
_everyone_ away. The fact that only about a hundred people are playing means
that the problems have to run deeper.

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Chazprime
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.

~~~
blueboo
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...

~~~
bluescrn
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.

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ggregoire
No the biggest issue wasn't the pricing structure.

Artifact was just not fun at all.

I've been playing a ton of MTG, HS, Gwent, MTGA, bought Artifact, played 5
hours, never touched the game again.

It's overengineered, unnecessary complex, too slow, too long, too random and
at the end exhausting, frustrating and not that interesting.

Most people played one or two games of Artifact a day then moved too something
else.

~~~
DanHulton
Exhausting is correct, I'd forgotten about that. A lot of games give you the
"just one more" feeling, like you could have won, or could keep winning, if
you just fired up another game right now and tried something just a little
differently.

At the end of every game of Artifact, I felt like I needed to take a break and
get some water. Talk about stream poison, if you have to psyche yourself up to
get into every new game.

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Fuccboi88
For 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."

------
aranelsurion
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.

~~~
me_me_me
>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.

HS has actually pretty good system, I played it for first few years and spend
almost no money on it (I got the adventure packs/tickets).

There are also a series on yt/twitch where players start from 0 and climb the
ladder.

Given what HS could be I have to give it to Blizzard for balancing the free
rewards to not be a grind-fest design to funnel ppl into buying packs.

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Moxdi
I 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

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drngdds
Responding to complaints about RNG by saying "actually our data shows that
it's fair" is totally missing the point. People don't like that the game
_feels_ too luck-based, whether or not it actually is.

~~~
EamonnMR
It's funny because it's the exact sort of thing Elias and Garfield wrote about
in their magnum opus on game design The Characteristics Of Games.

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doctorpangloss
They tripled down on the worst part of card games, paying to win.

~~~
nas
Valve's revenue models are going to kill it. At least, kill it as a studio
that can create high quality games. I not opposed to them making money and
getting compensated for hard work but the level of greed is getting insane.
For the Dota TI prize pool, they take 75% of the revenue from Battle Pass
related sales (i.e. digital in-game items, like DLCs). Its not hard to
understand why they do it, the profit is insane:

[https://dotesports.com/dota-2/news/the-
international-2019-pr...](https://dotesports.com/dota-2/news/the-
international-2019-prize-pool-surpasses-25-million)

However, why should the company ever spend the effort to build games? Making
the Battle Pass content is vastly easier. I don't see how they are going to be
able to wean themselves off such a juicy revenue stream.

Artifact was a result of this new reality. The game was designed from the get-
go to optimize revenue from in-game digital items. Why should a digital card
in a computer game cost $100? A rational person would realize it is an insane
idea. I'm glad that Artifact crashed and burned.

I don't think Valve learned their lesson. The whole game industry is moving
that way. E.g. free to play games with paid in-game items. I wish they could
figure out a more healthy way to fund game development. Human nature being
what it is, I'm not holding my breath.

------
overcast
I 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.

~~~
CydeWeys
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.

~~~
bloaf
I think this is the key thing. The problem isn't that Valve charged too much.
The problem is that _people thought_ Valve was charging too much. Why did they
think that? It is because the pricing was too "in your face" and prevented you
from actually playing the game. People will spend a lot [0] so long as they
feel like they aren't being forced into it.

[0]
[https://www.reddit.com/r/leagueoflegends/comments/4by4e4/pol...](https://www.reddit.com/r/leagueoflegends/comments/4by4e4/poll_how_much_money_have_you_spent_on_league_of/?st=j6yljvcw&sh=30e30634)

~~~
CydeWeys
> The problem isn't that Valve charged too much. The problem is that people
> thought Valve was charging too much.

I don't think this is a meaningful distinction. The correct price is
determined in large part by whatever people are willing to pay. The vast
majority of the addressable customer base deciding that a price is too high
means that it effectively is too high. Valve certainly hasn't maximized their
profit at the current price level. And since the marginal cost of offering
more product on digital goods is effectively zero, they have a wide range of
options in addressing the problem, unlike manufacturers of physical goods who
have a base price level of the cost of manufacture.

~~~
bloaf
But what I am saying is that Valve could have kept the game effectively the
same price and avoided the criticism by changing _how_ they charged the
player.

------
jdoliner
I tried Artifact for a little while but got really into this other card game
called Prismata around the same time. I suspect artifact would have done a lot
better 5 years ago, when there weren't so many digital trading card games.
Valve should have stuck to what they do best, which is waiting for people to
make cool mods of their games and then buying / remaking them. Fortunately
they seem to have wound up doing that anyways with Underlords.

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vasili111
Price! People are not ready anymore to pay lot of money for one game.
HearthStone which also needs lots of money in order to be competitive is also
on decline. Just look at the twitch view counts (which indirectly indicates
game popularity). 1-2 years ago HearthStone was at 2-4 position now usually it
is at >15 position. People do not like that kind of monetization scheme any
more.

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michelb
I'd say not capitalising on one of their greatest games is another huge
failure as well..(HL3)

~~~
gcatalfamo
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.

~~~
nitrogen
Duke Nukem Forever is one example of this.

But Black Mesa is a counterexample; they still haven't released Xen last time
I checked, but everything they have released far exceeds expectations. Maybe
Valve should pay that group to finish the HL series.

~~~
arianon
The first three maps of Black Mesa: Xen were just released a few weeks ago,
actually.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IzR3vllw6O0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IzR3vllw6O0)

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jccalhoun
Pricing may have been a part of it but what did it for me was that it looks
really complicated. I haven't played it so maybe it isn't but I am sure that
just looking complicated kept a lot of people like me away from it.

------
benbristow
Nobody asked for a Valve card game.

We're all waiting for a '3' of any of their franchises.

~~~
Reedx
"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.

~~~
cm2012
DotA was a well established Warcraft 3 custom game with the same name before
Valve copied it.

~~~
Reedx
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.

~~~
mos_basik
It's an excellent strategy. To add to your examples: Team Fortress was
originally a Quake mod, and Valve hired its creators to head Team Fortress 2's
development. Counter-Strike was originally a Half-Life mod before Valve bought
the rights and made CS:S, then CS:GO.

