Valve released their first game in years late last year. Artifact was a collectible card game, based on the lore of DOTA 2. More perplexingly, it was not a free to play game, where just about every major title in the genre is. That said, there was still a certain degree of expectation from the title, since, well, it’s a Valve game. And you’d expect Valve games to do well, no matter what.
But Artifact doesn’t seem to be obliging. As of right now, the game has less than 1,700 players (according to Steam Charts), which means it has plummeted out of the top hundred most played games on Steam entirely—hitherto unseen performance for a currently supported Valve game.
It’s unclear why the game has failed to gain traction, but to be fair, it’s also too early to sound the warning bells just yet. Counter Strike GO similarly threatened to sink without a trace shortly after launch, and now it is Valve’s biggest game. Maybe the studio will manage to turn things around. We’ll see.