Artifact

Valve's troubled trading-card game Artifact looks like it will be put out of its misery soon enough, as the dev announced there will be no more work done on the game.

Valve released a blog post detailing some of their progress with the testing of the attempt to revitalise Artifact and mentioned that some players interested in participating in beta will get invites next week.

Valve's attempt at a Dota 2 inspired TCG, Artifact, released to abysmal reception and now the devs are trying to revive it. One of the highlights is the addition of a singleplayer campaign.

It may not be Half-Life 3, but Valve's new game Dota Underlords is off to a great start. Having ripped through Artifact's all-time concurrent player record in mere hours since launch, Dota Underlords currently has 179 thousand players.

Streaming giant Twitch have filed a lawsuit against unknown streamers who were streaming porn, copyright material and violent content under the Artifact directory. At the moment the company don't know the identities of these streamers.

Valve have finally admitted they messed up with Artifact and now they are working to fix the game but it will apparently take some time as the issues are deep-rooted, according to an official blog post on the Steam Community page.

Late 2018 was filled with rocky game launches, anti-consumer practices and overall bad play experience. Artifact seems to have been one of those games and players apparently had enough of this treatment, as 94,5 per cent deserted the game.

Valve have revealed update notes that include a nerf to Axe, the card that was the most powerful and the most expensive one on the roster. They offered a refund that may not cover the price some players paid, in some cases not even a half.

It would be foolish to expect Artifact's cards to ignore the all-governing market concept of supply and demand but seeing that Axe costs more than the game itself, regardless of how formidable the card may be, does make one think.

Artifact is slowly kicking off with rather positive reviews from critics, but they are offset by enraged players who are review bombing the game on both Metacritic and Steam. Most of these complaints are about Valve's monetisation approach.