For a big developer with a big name, there’s nothing worse than going into something and knowing that it could be great, and then for one reason or another, it’s not only not great, but fans don’t like it either. For Valve, this is what happened last year with Artifact, their first major game release in years. The collectible card game was meant to be the next great card game title. But fans weren’t impressed at all, and the game struggled to get any sort of real fans base.
Now, months after the failure of the launch, Valve is pulling the game back to try and fix what is broken:
“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,” writes Valve in an honest new message to fans. “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.”
They went on to note that this was the largest ‘discrepancy” between developer and fan that they’ve ever had. And they mean to fix that in their own way:
“Since launch, we’ve been looking carefully at how players interact with the game as well as gathering feedback. It has become clear that there are deep-rooted issues with the game and that our original update strategy of releasing new features and cards would be insufficient to address them. Instead, we believe the correct course of action is to take larger steps, to re-examine the decisions we’ve made along the way regarding game design, the economy, the social experience of playing, and more.”
They note that it’ll likely take a good amount of time to get Artifact where they, and the players, need it to be, but they’re willing to take that time to make it work.
