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Valve's Artifact Ended 2018 Outside Steam's Top 100 Most Played Games

The Player Base for the New Dota Card Game Has Already Dwindled Down to Only a Few Thousand Concurrent Players

January 2, 2019 by

It became clear that Valve was going to have a hard time selling Artifact when fans were left disgruntled (to say the least) by the Dota card game’s reveal at The International 2017.

Similar to Blizzard’s Diablo Immortal blunder at Blizzcon a couple months ago, Valve’s decision to try and monetize a $19.99 card game and ignore the demand to create sequels to their best-selling franchises Half-Life, Left 4 Dead, and Portal isn’t paying off for the popular publisher.

As expected, Artifact had a strong debut for a card game on Steam, peaking as the No. 4 most played game during its launch with 60k concurrent players.

However, Artifact‘s debut was relatively low when compared to the peaks of Valve’s other top games on Steam in 2018 such as Dota 2 (845k players) and Counter-Strike: Global Offensive (747k players).

And while we figured Artifact wouldn’t come close to matching Valve’s other top games, what neither us nor Valve were expecting was how quickly Artifact would lose most of its player base in 2018.

Dota 2 and CS:GO have stayed at the top of Steam for years, but in just the past month, Artifact‘s player base has declined by so much that at times it ranks just outside of Steam’s top 100 most played games with only a few thousand concurrent players.

Now, with the rise of Fortnite on the Epic Games Store and more triple-A developers pulling their games from Steam, Valve is in need of new games that can help Steam stay on top as the premier platform for PC gaming… unfortunately, based on the numbers, Artifact doesn’t look like it’s going to be it.