Valve's Artifact was supposed to be a return to glory for the long-time developer and Steam store owner -- at least from its own perspective. The lane-based living card game was designed to blend MOBA action with collectable cards with a dose of DOTA 2 thematics and lore. That turned out to be a popular idea at first, with regular player numbers exceeding 10,000 and speedy matchmaking was commonplace. Today though, player counts can be as low as just a few hundred at a time, leading to long queues to get into games.
With no word from Valve in weeks about what's coming next for Artifact and months since its last update, it isn't clear whether there's even much of a future for Valve's most recent game.
Where once buying every card in Artifact would have cost you upwards of $200, with the rarest and most powerful costing as much as $50 each, you can now pick up just about every card in the game for as little as $70. Their value continues to fall too, so it's possible it won't be long before all cards in Artifact cost just a few dollars each at most.
In the wake of little communication from Valve, Kotaku reports that players have begun calling the game dead, while others plead with Valve for some kind of sign that the game isn't.
From Valve's part in things, it released some minor updates for the game in January, but the official Twitter account hasn't posted anything since mid-December. There also haven't been any released roadmaps, or any manifestation of the million dollar tournament that Valve suggested was coming in Early 2019.
What do you think the future has in store for Artifact? Are you still playing it in hopes it has a resurgence?