once upon a time, artifactwas created by Steam, Half-Life, and Dota giant Valve. The title has never performed particularly well, with issues on everything from its approach to monetization to players being confused by its existence. Eventually, all work on the title was halted and it was set to be free-to-play, and the story ended there.
However, there have been a few twists in Artifact’s story. The first happened a few months ago, when over 2,000 players suddenly gathered en masse to play a card game, only to disappear like mist in the summer sun a few days later. Now, it’s happening again, this time in much larger numbers.
At the time of writing, there were 3,557 simultaneous players in a game of Artifact, with a 24-hour peak of 3,966. To put this in context, there are typically fewer than 100 people playing Artifact, so it’s definitely a big jump for a title. However, just like last time, it’s all looking a bit shady.
As with the previous incident, these numbers are remarkably balanced and would never have happened if these players had naturally joined the game. Moreover, the jump from nearly zero to nearly 4,000 happened in just a moment and is another alarming event.
It’s probably the work of a bot, but the question remains. Why? You can’t earn trading cards, so it’s not a way to make money from Steam trading. My guess is that it has to do with giving your account credit to make it look real. Even an abandoned free game like Artifact has a good chance of looking like a real account if you spend enough time in the game. That said, there’s a reason the authentication system is there. Without at least $5 in purchases on your account, you remain locked out of many Steam features.
This means that Artifact is most likely not making a comeback, and this is simply what has happened before with this game and other titles such as Allods Online: in a few days, the player count will drop again and tumbleweeds will return to card games.
If you’d like something else to occupy yourself with while you wait for Steam’s numbers to stabilize, our guides to the best fantasy games and best free-to-play PC games are sure to find you in great company.
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