Valve holds Artifact game and releases both versions for free

by Fanboy SEO · March 5, 2021

The game Artifact, the DOTA-related game from Valve is officially being shelved after all the negative comments it got during its beta testing some time back.

They wrote a lengthy blog post about the development of the game on the Steam website.

Artifact, the Dota 2 card game, shipped in November of 2018. Despite good initial sales, our player count fell off pretty dramatically. This warranted a shift from the service/update development model we’d planned to a full reevaluation of the game’s mechanics and economy.

It’s now been about a year and a half since the current Artifact team began work on a reboot in earnest. While we’re reasonably satisfied we accomplished most of our game-side goals, we haven’t managed to get the active player numbers to a level that justifies further development at this time. As such, we’ve made the tough decision to stop development on the Artifact 2.0 Beta.

However, we recognize that both versions of Artifact still have players and still have value to the community. For this reason, we’re opening both games up to make them available for free to everyone. Final releases of both Artifact Classic and Artifact 2.0 Beta (renamed Artifact Foundry) are now available. Technically Artifact Foundry remains an unfinished product, but most of what’s missing is polish and art – the core gameplay is all there. While both games will remain playable, we don’t plan to ship any further gameplay updates.

Here’s an overview of our final changes to Artifact Classic:

The game is free for everyone to play.

All players get every card for free. You will no longer be able to buy card packs.

Paid players’ existing cards have been converted into special Collector’s Edition versions, which will remain marketable. Marketplace integration has been removed from the game.

Paid event tickets have been removed.

Customers who paid for the game will still earn packs of Collector’s Edition cards for playing; players who got the game for free will not.

The final release of Artifact Foundry looks like this:

The game is free for everyone to play.

Players gain access to cards by playing the game. All cards are earned this way; no cards or packs will be for sale and Artifact Foundry cards are not marketable.

All final card art that was in the pipeline is now in the game.

(In short, when we say “free”, we really mean “free.”)

For a detailed explanation of how Artifact Foundry differs from the Artifact Classic, see this page.

We’re grateful to all Artifact players, and particularly to those who were able to help us tune and refine what would become Artifact Foundry. The team feels this is the approach that best serves the community. We’re proud of the work we’ve done on both games and excited about delivering them to a much larger audience of gamers.

To install and play now, head over to the store page.

Thanks,
The Artifact Team

The two versions of Artifact that would be released for free are Artifact Classic and Artifact Foundry. For the free version, most new cards will no longer be available for purchase nor would it be tradeable on the Steam market. The Artifact Foundry cards on the other hand can only be added to player’s decks through in-game challenges.

And if you bought the game when it was originally released, your cards will automatically be converted to “Collector’s Edition version” and they can still be tradeable on the Steam Marketplace.

Check out the Artifact launch trailer, released two years ago…