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.
Right. I don't think it's controversial at all to say that the game would have been far more successful with a visible and statistically sound MMR (Elo, Glicko, whatever). I played Artifact for maybe 30 hours. The free draft was fine, and I never engaged with the other forms of gameplay so the predatory economics didn't directly affect my experience.
But in the end I had no way of knowing whether I was getting any better, and the games ended up feeling totally meaningless.
> 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.
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.
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.
The worst part about the in your face RNG of Artifact is that Richard Garfield knew players don't like that type of RNG, and it was one of the main factors that killed off the Star Wars TCG he developed [1]. He decided to try it again in Artifact, and to nobody's suprise, people still don't like super visible RNG affecting the outcome.
> people still don't like super visible RNG affecting the outcome.
Everybody says this, but the problem is that RNGs are friendlier to noobs.
The real problem is that any game like this has two markets--noobs and experts. And you have to win over both--that's a tall order.
You have to have a continuous influx of noobs or your game dies. However, the experts have to be able to fleece the noobs and gain enough money consistently or they will leave and you will have nobody encouraging the noobs.
In the artifact the RNG in baked into the game itself, there is on way to avoid it.
In HS you can build deck that has none of it (or varying degrees). You still are at the mercy of a draw (but that's just the beauty of deck building).
> Standing above in their white tower, yelling down "but the math says you're wrong" doesn't matter if nobody's having any fun.
Even Wizards of the Coast (WotC) struggles with this in Magic: the Gathering, and that game has been around for over 25 years and remains King of the paper TCGs. Counterspells, discard, and land destruction are all very balanced effects, but a plurality of the players hate them so much that WotC eventually made those effects more expensive or less reliable.
One of the keys of game design is that your first goal is not to build something that's balanced; it's to build something that's fun to play. Making something balanced and competitive, though necessary, are secondary to the enjoyment of the game.
> Making something balanced and competitive, though necessary, are secondary to the enjoyment of the game.
That's generally not true today, where 'organic' marketing driven by professional streamers is a large part of potential players' initial exposure to a game. Streamers can easily kill a game in its infancy simply by providing negative feedback (as we're seeing here).
But the pro players will only commit if they think there will be a successful pro scene revolving around a balanced, relatively low RNG, high-skill-cap game.
So developers are forced to attempt to appeal to two very different markets and occasionally stumble badly.
If that were true, then chess and go would be the most streamed games on Twitch. If that were true, then Apex and PUBG would have beaten Fortnite for popularity.
Streamers are great advertisers, but players are your customers.
> 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).
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.
As someone who has put in over 10k hours into dota since 2004, price was my issue as well. I don't want to pay for the game and then pay for the cards.
I would have been the natural convert to artefact. Yet they missed on players like me
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.
Valve has very little reason to make a single player game. Why make hl3 while someone else can make a similar selling game and you taking 30% of it? A game like artifact is more appealing to them because it has a potential to become next hearthstone, which is much more profitable than a single player game that only sells once
Also hype around hl3 is too much, it will be below expectations no matter how much hard Valve tries.
Agreed. Basically, not being able to both run Steam and continue being one of the best game development studios in the industry, which they surely were 20 years ago.
I understand that they're going to naturally follow the money and put their resources where those resources will do the most good, it's just a shame that they couldn't keep succeeding at the thing that made them big in the first place. They've made many great games.
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...
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.
tens of millions ... is what you make _in a month_ by selling hats inside free to play game. Valve has precisely zero incentive to make any game except for concepts centered around selling digital property, coincidentally like a computer card game!
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.
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."
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.
>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.
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
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.
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:
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.
That’s basically what Valve in general got too comfortable with. Loot boxes brought in a ton of cash and they realized they didn’t have to make real games anymore.
We could have had new Left 4 Dead.
IMO they ruined TF2. I haven’t really played it in a while because every time I do it’s all completely different and just a joke.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
Microtransactions exist because people continue to dump a ton of money into them. They wouldn't otherwise. Magic has digital game people don't see to have any issue buying into. The problem is that Valve implemented them in a way that wasn't very player friendly.
Lots of people have an issue buying expensive Magic decks and respond by choosing not to play competitive Magic. Drafting isn't everyone's thing and pauper is both super restrictive and harder to find events for.
Physical Magic cards hold their value really well, and, in general, increase in value.
In comparison, MTG Arena costs less overall, but there is no way to cash out. I have nothing of value. Just an account with digital cards. I could sell the account, but I'm sure that's against the TOS. That's how most digital card games work. I didn't play Artifact but it seems like a huge ripoff.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Depends on how much you have to lose. Valve has a lot, and what they could win is a drop in the ocean next to "the steam tax". The icing on the cake is that there is value for them in competing less with those who publish on steam.
HL3 would have brought attention for sure but you are selling dota a bit short here. Personally I bought in day 1 to artifact based solely on how much I love dota. I have spent hundreds on dota cosmetics, battle passes, etc. Artifact failed because the game just was not fun to play at all. If the pricing scheme was the issue people still would pay money for a game they can't get enough of.
The longer they spent since last HL2 episode the more DNF the case became, and after few years it was certainly better to not make HL3 because it would fail horribly.
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.
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.
I get the point, and it is true to an extent that the best products/games are ones that people didn't even know they wanted (the original ipod being a good example), but this faith in valve is misplaced at this point. half life was an incredible achievement, but it was released over twenty years ago. the last great original title (imo) created by valve was left 4 dead, released over a decade ago. I definitely like steam better than any of the other distribution platforms, but in terms of actual games, they haven't done much worth talking about in the last ten years; they're just playing out the endgame on their old IP.
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.