Valve Ceases Artifact Development, Makes It Free-To-Play Instead

Valve has decided to cease development on its Dota 2-based card game Artifact and its revamp, Artifact 2.0, citing issues with growing the player base necessary to justify the development.

In a Steam blog post, Valve wrote that while it's proud of the work it managed to accomplish on Artifact's reboot, the studio wasn't satisfied with the size of the game's current player base.

"It's now been about a year and a half since the current Artifact team began work on a reboot in earnest," Valve wrote. "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."