When a game enters maintenance mode, there’s always the brief hope that it will suddenly garner wider interest and see at least a small resurgence of players. In the case of Artifact, the Valve-designed digital TCG that went into maintenance mode in 2021 after the company decided to stop working on a full reboot of the game, players saw a very odd resurgence that skyrocketed for a few days and then cratered just as quickly.
SteamDB shows that player numbers for Artifact roared upward over New Year’s Eve and into January 2nd, cresting at a total of 12,771 players on January 1st. Then, by January 3rd, player numbers literally took a nosedive back to their original figures of just over 100 players. Looking at the monthly player breakdown, we find that this isn’t the first time this has happened, with sudden surges of thousands of players last February, July, and September; the most recent spike just stands out as the largest one to date.
This phenomenon continues to baffle the few fans within the game’s community, as a couple of threads on Reddit sees gamers scratching their heads and attempting to guess what’s happening. The most popular assumption is that these are bots, while others presume that these are pirate accounts or players who are waiting to playtest Valve’s developing hero shooter Deadlock. Whatever is happening, this might not be the last time Artifact is visited by digital aliens.
