How Artifact became Valve's biggest failure
eurogamer.net
eurogamer.net
I have two opinions on why the game failed. First, while it was a truly satisfying game and wonderfully complex the random elements where both anti Dota and truly fuck you rng where a flip of a coin decides most high level games. Now, the same could be said about most competitive card games but in Artifact it was so visible, felt terrible, and had no ways to play around it. Hearthstone has learned that good rng is about having a range of bad medium to good results. In Artifact it was as either game losing or game winning, every time. Terrible design and in my opinion the game could of removed all rng entirely and it would of been an amazing niche competitive game. The problem though is, the ranking system, tournaments, and pay to play economy made competitive play boring with no rewards. I am not exaggerating when I say the game would of not been a failure if it had a solid visible Elo ranking system.
Second opinion: the entire design philosophy was a failure from day one. Dota has over 100 heros. Imagine a hearthstone style game were on day one you had 100 heroes to choose from, each with their own cards added to your deck and having four skills (like hero powers in hearthstone). Games remain fast while still being complex and keeping the spirit of Dota (100s of options). I believe valve has no clue what their audience wants.
But in the end I had no way of knowing whether I was getting any better, and the games ended up feeling totally meaningless.
Maybe that's the problem - if they were trying to make something they think the audience wants. The audience itself doesn't know what it wants, let alone anyone removed from it making guesses on their behalf.
The audience didn't know they wanted DotA or Minecraft until they were made.
It may be that RNG is actually less of a factor in Artifact than in other similar games, but boy does it FEEL stronger. Every turn in a CCG lets you draw cards, and maybe you don't get the card you need, but maybe your opponent didn't also, you don't know, but instantly. But in Artifact, every turn drops creeps in the lanes for both you and your opponent, so you can instantly see if RNG has blessed you or cursed you.
It doesn't even feel great to win when RNG is on your side sometimes. Your opponent has built a huge bruiser in an early lane that will just demolish you there and win the game, except a creep spawns in front of him, blocking all that damage. I mean, I didn't do that, that was just luck. I didn't make a good play or build a good deck to get that one extra turn, I just got lucky with creep spawns.
Sure, there's definitely more around it that got me to that point where I could get lucky, I understand that, but that other work doesn't feel emphasized, the last-second luck does.
And the biggest failure of the Artifact team isn't in the design of this, it's the hubris of not listening to the players complaining about it. It doesn't matter if you build the fairest CCG in the land, if it feels like swingy garbage, nobody's going to play it and it's going to fail. Standing above in their white tower, yelling down "but the math says you're wrong" doesn't matter if nobody's having any fun.
Even Wizards of the Coast (WotC) struggles with this in Magic: the Gathering, and that game has been around for over 25 years and remains King of the paper TCGs. Counterspells, discard, and land destruction are all very balanced effects, but a plurality of the players hate them so much that WotC eventually made those effects more expensive or less reliable.
One of the keys of game design is that your first goal is not to build something that's balanced; it's to build something that's fun to play. Making something balanced and competitive, though necessary, are secondary to the enjoyment of the game.
That's generally not true today, where 'organic' marketing driven by professional streamers is a large part of potential players' initial exposure to a game. Streamers can easily kill a game in its infancy simply by providing negative feedback (as we're seeing here).
But the pro players will only commit if they think there will be a successful pro scene revolving around a balanced, relatively low RNG, high-skill-cap game.
So developers are forced to attempt to appeal to two very different markets and occasionally stumble badly.
Streamers are great advertisers, but players are your customers.
Fwiw, price _was_ my only problem and i still stopped playing. Why? Because it felt the game's intentions differed from mine. It felt like the game was trying to be Magic, where as i just wanted to play a card-dota game - not invest in some market, continually buying packs, etc.
In addition to this, the drama and complaints surrounding the market also made me feel like the game was doomed for failure. And the type of game it was made me not want to play it if it died (unlike a single player game, where i'd happily play regardless of other people).
Just my 2c / context.
I would have been the natural convert to artefact. Yet they missed on players like me
https://magic.wizards.com/en/articles/archive/making-magic/k...
Everybody says this, but the problem is that RNGs are friendlier to noobs.
The real problem is that any game like this has two markets--noobs and experts. And you have to win over both--that's a tall order.
You have to have a continuous influx of noobs or your game dies. However, the experts have to be able to fleece the noobs and gain enough money consistently or they will leave and you will have nobody encouraging the noobs.
I understand that they're going to naturally follow the money and put their resources where those resources will do the most good, it's just a shame that they couldn't keep succeeding at the thing that made them big in the first place. They've made many great games.
Steam is hundreds of times more profitable than any game could ever be.
Also hype around hl3 is too much, it will be below expectations no matter how much hard Valve tries.
Artifact was just not fun at all.
I've been playing a ton of MTG, HS, Gwent, MTGA, bought Artifact, played 5 hours, never touched the game again.
It's overengineered, unnecessary complex, too slow, too long, too random and at the end exhausting, frustrating and not that interesting.
Most people played one or two games of Artifact a day then moved too something else.
At the end of every game of Artifact, I felt like I needed to take a break and get some water. Talk about stream poison, if you have to psyche yourself up to get into every new game.
"However, it seems the biggest issue for Artifact was the pricing structure. First off you had to drop £15.99 to just buy the game, which would give you two starter decks and 10 bonus packs of cards. If you then wanted to get more cards, which would have been necessary if you wanted to build a top level deck unless you got incredibly lucky, you would either have to buy more packs at £1.49, win them in the game modes that require a ticket, which cost £3.75 for a pack of five, to enter, or simply buy the cards from the Steam Marketplace.
But the rarity of the strongest cards such as Axe, "a card you needed in 80 per cent of competitive decks," according to Swim, meant prices shot up. Within two days of launch a single Axe already cost more than the game itself. It felt like you had to put down a lot of money if you wanted to play with a competitive deck in the most competitive modes in the early days."
Hearthstone is already strong in this market, they have $0 entry fee and only charge for the cards. It's a pay2win game, some like/accept it, and some don't. I don't. Because I'm not willing to pay some unknown amount of money for a game just to stay competitive everytime the meta changes. I play games for fun, and being destroyed in a game because of IRL money is no fun.
Now what I would consider as a strong alternative to Hearthstone, would be a game asking for a triple-A entry fee, and then charging nothing extra. In this game everyone would have the same chances, and nobody would have to feel bad just because they didn't invest enough money in a gambling scheme.
What Valve offered is a triple-A entry fee, and then charging for anything they can. Now how is this can ever be a good offer? I don't know. I simply ignored the game and moved on.
HS has actually pretty good system, I played it for first few years and spend almost no money on it (I got the adventure packs/tickets).
There are also a series on yt/twitch where players start from 0 and climb the ladder.
Given what HS could be I have to give it to Blizzard for balancing the free rewards to not be a grind-fest design to funnel ppl into buying packs.
We could have had new Left 4 Dead.
IMO they ruined TF2. I haven’t really played it in a while because every time I do it’s all completely different and just a joke.
https://dotesports.com/dota-2/news/the-international-2019-pr...
However, why should the company ever spend the effort to build games? Making the Battle Pass content is vastly easier. I don't see how they are going to be able to wean themselves off such a juicy revenue stream.
Artifact was a result of this new reality. The game was designed from the get-go to optimize revenue from in-game digital items. Why should a digital card in a computer game cost $100? A rational person would realize it is an insane idea. I'm glad that Artifact crashed and burned.
I don't think Valve learned their lesson. The whole game industry is moving that way. E.g. free to play games with paid in-game items. I wish they could figure out a more healthy way to fund game development. Human nature being what it is, I'm not holding my breath.
Artifact uses the microtransaction model to the very extreme, to the point where it costs real money to play a ranked game (not even to get new stuff, just to play a game). This has understandably turned off a huge number of people. With AAA games that have microtransactions, at least your initial outlay is buying a lot, and you don't have to continue putting in money just to play it.
[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/leagueoflegends/comments/4by4e4/pol...
I don't think this is a meaningful distinction. The correct price is determined in large part by whatever people are willing to pay. The vast majority of the addressable customer base deciding that a price is too high means that it effectively is too high. Valve certainly hasn't maximized their profit at the current price level. And since the marginal cost of offering more product on digital goods is effectively zero, they have a wide range of options in addressing the problem, unlike manufacturers of physical goods who have a base price level of the cost of manufacture.
In comparison, MTG Arena costs less overall, but there is no way to cash out. I have nothing of value. Just an account with digital cards. I could sell the account, but I'm sure that's against the TOS. That's how most digital card games work. I didn't play Artifact but it seems like a huge ripoff.
But Black Mesa is a counterexample; they still haven't released Xen last time I checked, but everything they have released far exceeds expectations. Maybe Valve should pay that group to finish the HL series.
We're all waiting for a '3' of any of their franchises.
Portal was actually a similar thing. It started as a student game called Narbacular Drop. Valve hired that team, who turned the concept into Portal.
Likewise they hired Icefrog from DotA to work on DotA 2.
That's a good strategy.