Six years after the demise of Valve’s trading card game, Artifact’s player numbers took a mysterious jump in the New Year

Valve’s trading card game Artifact Classic peaked at 78 players last June. November was a slightly more promising month for the abandoned multiplayer game, with a monthly peak of 1,028 players. Then, on New Year’s Day, the number of players on Steam jumped to 11,900, which was the second-highest number of concurrent players outside of launch. Soon after, they disappeared. Who are these mysterious shufflers, flocking to empty, echoing halls amid Valve’s catastrophic failure, like your friend using the word “threshold” too much in a lifeless shopping mall? word? Forbes, which was the first to report this phenomenon, was not aware of it. no one knows. Maybe someone does know, but writing “no one knows” makes things more dramatic. Let’s take a closer look.
Watch on YouTube
The recent 24-day peak of 12,500 players echoes a rise of about 14,000 players in December, which lasted just one day. Forbes speculates that the cause is “possibly bots,” as there hasn’t been any noteworthy community or influencer activity on Twitch, YouTube, or similar platforms. According to Forbes, there’s no interest in Artifact’s cards, so unless Valve is hiding something related to Half-Life 3, there’s no clear reason why this is happening. unless…
According to IGN , the game’s Reddit subreddit has been doing some theoretical research of its own. Are Artifacts being used to train AI? Are there scam bots that increase game time to establish legitimacy for other nefarious purposes? Could it be that pirates are using the free game’s AppID/SDK to mask other games – an honor usually reserved for Space Wars, according to one poster?
Paul Curtin researched this in depth here , but the basic idea is that pirates would provide cracked games with the AppID of the Spacewar game, which used to be part of the Steamworks software development suite, as a testing tool. The pirated game then shows up on Steam as Space War, which then does whatever is on the platform, equivalent to a slightly shady British Bobby deciding to casually wave his baton and whistle.
If you’re interested in learning more about Artifact’s frustrating history, Will Partin’s excellent piece for Waypoint remains the definitive chronicle. The game ceased development and became free-to-play in 2021, with Valve saying “we have not yet increased active player numbers to a level that warrants further development.”
Valve’s latest multiplayer offering is Deadlock, which Matt Cox profiles here.