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Valve's digital card game based on Dota 2, Artifact, has hit an all-time low. The past 24 hours saw a peak of only 363 players, compared to the all-time peak of 60,000 players 4 months ago. It's strange to see a Valve-produced game tank so hard, but even they are capable of mistakes.
In a recent blog post, Valve has acknowledged their disappointment and that the current model is not working. The game itself is really fun, compared to other card games in the market such as Hearthstone, Gwent or Shadowverse. But their model for gathering cards wasn't working, especially because you could get a lot of duplicate hero cards.
What was unique about Artifact was also the market system, where players could trade their cards in the Steam Marketplace for a custom price. So you didn't have to depend on just premium packs to get cards. But even that wasn't enough for the game to take off.
The $20 price tag behind the game is also another hindrance for players. Most digital card games are free to play and the premium services are the packs of cards themselves, or with other unique game modes. Valve has proved with CS:GO that they are willing to remove the price tag from a game to boost it. And it worked, CS:GO saw a huge spike in players after that move.
Going free-to-play with Artifact is the first step Valve will need to take. Being more generous with card packs is another. What also helped many digital card games such as Hearthstone and Shadowverse is that they had mobile ports, which made it much more accessible. Gwent also recently got an announcement that they will have mobile ports for iOS and Android. Valve rarely produces games outside PC but the mobile market is a huge one right now.
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