Artifact has been turned into a free game by Valve

There won't be any further gameplay updates and the development of its reboot has stopped as well.

Hopes were high when Valve just announced their strategy CCG Artifact: the game is set in the Dota 2 universe and released back in November, 2018. However, Artifact didn't really live up to the developers' expectations: first, it lost 90% of its player base in less than two months, then the concurrent players dropped below 1,000. The game's mechanics and economy were also criticised by a lot of players. Not a good sign. This therefore led the team to work on a "reboot", called Artifact 2.0.

Sadly, even though Valve tried to fix the problems, it just didn't work out. "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", said the developer team. "As such, we've made the tough decision to stop development on the Artifact 2.0 Beta."

However, the good news for the current players and fans is, both versions of the game will still remain playable, just don't expect to see any further gameplay updates. Both games are going to be available for free to everyone from now on.

Now, the final releases of both Artifact Classic and Artifact 2.0 Beta (renamed Artifact Foundry) are available, you can check all the changes over here.

Since Artifact is free now, will you give it a try?