Could there possibly be a “3” in our future?
In a move that probably isn’t terribly surprising to anyone in the know, Valve has decided to stop development on the DOTA 2 card game, Artifact. The game will now go free-to-play, as well.
The decision cites a number of reasons, but chief among them would be the game’s less-than-ideal player base. From their news post:
It’s now been about a year and a half since the current Artifact team began work on a reboot in earnest. 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.
However, we recognize that both versions of Artifact still have players and still have value to the community. For this reason, we’re opening both games up to make them available for free to everyone. Final releases of both Artifact Classic and Artifact 2.0 Beta (renamed Artifact Foundry) are now available. Technically Artifact Foundry remains an unfinished product, but most of what’s missing is polish and art – the core gameplay is all there. While both games will remain playable, we don’t plan to ship any further gameplay updates.
In essence, they’re not going to keep working on it anymore, but it will stay playable for the foreseeable future. Furthermore, all cards are now available to all players for free. Also, all final card art that was in the pipeline is now in the game, and all plaid players have their cards turned into Collector’s Edition cards, meaning that those cards are still marketable (unlike those earned from the free-to-play version), even though marketplace integration is being removed from the game in general.
As to what the team that was working on Artifact will do now is anyone’s guess.
Source: Gamespot
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