Steam's Anniversary Reminded of Valve's Biggest Failure of 2018
There were many successful launches cited on Steam's anniversary page. Among them, there was also one of Valve's biggest failures.
Steam is celebrating its 20th anniversary. For this reason, Valve reminded users of the highlights of each year of the platform, including the biggest game launches. Some of them noted that the list also unexpectedly included one of Valve's most egregious failures.
Valve recalls its failure
The aforementioned failure is the F2P game Artifact from 2018. The title, a card game based on one of Valve's hit games - Dota 2 - was listed among the "biggest launches of 2018" alongside such titles as Assassin's Creed: Odyssey, Shadow of the Tomb Raider or Frostpunk.
- Artifact's peak on Steam stands at 60,646 concurrent players and was reached five years ago, which was when the game debuted on the platform.
- To date, the game has received nearly 25,000 ratings, of which only 46% are positive.
- Originally very popular, the game very quickly began to lose players. Valve fired game's designer, halted development of the title and announced extensive rework, but Gabe Newell finally admitted that the game is a failure. At the end of the day, plans to prepare version 2.0 have been abandoned - the work on the game was completed and it was made fully available for free.
- In recent days Artifact was played by a maximum of several dozen players simultaneously, which is a good indication of how respected the game is among the users of Steam.
In doing so, it is important to note the situation on September 13. Yesterday Steam published a special summary of its history and Artifact being included attracted a large group of users to the game - 1,098 users played it simultaneously (via SteamDB), but today that number is back to "normal."
Steam's anniversary page brings back memories
Although Valve also boasts some of its less successful productions, the 20th anniversary website prepared for the occasion looks really good.
It features a lot of information about the beginnings of the platform and the key moments that have made Steam the largest digital game store on the market..
The whole site refers in color to the first years of the platform, so especially those older users who have been awarded by Valve, can feel a bit of nostalgia as they browse through each year and the games that debuted during that time.
