We’re just about two months into the life cycle of Valve’s aggressively non-free-to-play card game Artifact, and the game continues to lose players with a focus and intensity usually reserved for gaining them. Steam Charts shows that the game has lost 56% of its playerbase over the last 30 days… and that’s from the middle of December, when the game had already lost nearly five-sixths of its launch playerbase. As Kotaku notes, the game has dipped as low as 1500 players, which means that it’s being beaten by Dark Souls II and Portal 2.
While Valve has repeatedly said that the team is in for the long haul on Artifact, Kotaku also notes that the game’s Twitter account has been silent since December 21st and the game’s patches are getting significantly smaller. None of this is a good sign, and while there was meant to be a large-scale tournament for the game this year, it remains to be seen if this will materialize. Perhaps buy-to-play and cards that can only be bought via more money wasn’t actually a foolproof scheme for competing in this arena.
