[Ars] Richard Garfield leaves Valve, puts Artifact’s future in question

tpi2007 · Mar 12, 2019

Richard Garfield, the legendary game designer behind Magic: The Gathering, says he has been laid off from Valve as part of a recent modest downsizing effort at the company. The move comes as Artifact, Valve's Dota 2-based card game which Garfield worked on closely, struggles to find a continuing audience.

"We weren't surprised by the layoff considering how rocky the launch was," Garfield told Artifact-focused site Artibuff. "The team was enthusiastic about the game and were confident that they had a good product, but it became clear it wasn't going to be easy to get the game to where we wanted it."

After launching with tens of thousands of simultaneous players in November, though, Artifact quickly declined in popularity, to the point that only about 500 players have been online at any time in the last week, according to stats collected by SteamDB.

Source.

Hey, Gabe, there were more people playing Half-Life or Half-Life 2 than Artifact last week and yesterday it got worse. Wake up and smell the ashes.

https://steamdb.info/graph/?compare=70,220,380,420,583950

Defoler · Mar 12, 2019

tpi2007 said:
Wake up and smell the ashes.

Well isn't that why he got fired with a few other people? Gabe (or someone high up) decided that it better to leave it as is and drop future development?
They did smell the ash, and brought a fan to clear it out.

keikei · Mar 12, 2019

Is Artifact that bad? Possibly game saturation?

tpi2007 · Mar 12, 2019

Defoler said:
Well isn't that why he got fired with a few other people? Gabe (or someone high up) decided that it better to leave it as is and drop future development?
They did smell the ash, and brought a fan to clear it out.

You missed the reference.

iamjanco · Mar 12, 2019

On the plus side, now they've got more room for HL3 dev and illustrator workstations.

Mand12 · Mar 12, 2019

Artifact's future hasn't been in question since about a week after its launch.

It has none.

EniGma1987 · Mar 12, 2019

Really seems like these card games had a momentary blip in popularity that quickly died. No surprise to me that the game is doing bad, Valve was pretty late to the party.

epic1337 · Mar 12, 2019

Artifact could've been a mini-game under DOTA2's arcade tbh, they didn't really need something like this.

ku4eto · Mar 12, 2019

Maybe if it was free to play game, it wouldnt have such outcome.

nonametoclaim · Mar 12, 2019

ku4eto said:
Maybe if it was free to play game, it wouldnt have such outcome.

i have to agree with you there. Fort Night (as much as i hate it) has proven that you dont have to sell a game for it to be profitable.

JackCY · Mar 12, 2019

It's not a game people want to play.

Magic: The Gathering... they made sort of a one off rubbish I wouldn't play either and that saturated that market. Making more and more variants under different name won't magically bring more customers.

Valve had Half-Life and then Steam, the rest... what rest... not worth mentioning really. It was either a mod or bought from elsewhere.
Valve will sit on Steam until they keel over. All their explorations into AR, VR, ... some games no one wants to play... just a money dump.
HL3 that people want they do not want to make because they would need a damn good writer and team to build it, neither of which they have anymore.

Omega X · Mar 13, 2019

ku4eto said:
Maybe if it was free to play game, it wouldnt have such outcome.

^^^This.

The game had a load of defenders claiming that the game would do fine with a pay to play model. Now we have proof that it didn't.

skupples · Mar 13, 2019

better off playing OG MTG with their newest release than any other card game, Gwent included

oxidized · Mar 13, 2019

EniGma1987 said:
Really seems like these card games had a momentary blip in popularity that quickly died. No surprise to me that the game is doing bad, Valve was pretty late to the party.

Hearthstone is very popular even now, it's actually in the top 10 even right now. It's the game that matters, and what is its target audience, TCGs in general were never that popular, in videogames, old magic the gathering games did very poorly, because they required much time and patience to get to actually know the game, hearthstone is much different from that, it's a very simple, basic game, and that's why people play it much much more than magic the gathering arena, or artifact or anything else.

ku4eto · Mar 14, 2019

oxidized said:
Hearthstone is very popular even now, it's actually in the top 10 even right now. It's the game that matters, and what is its target audience, TCGs in general were never that popular, in videogames, old magic the gathering games did very poorly, because they required much time and patience to get to actually know the game, hearthstone is much different from that, it's a very simple, basic game, and that's why people play it much much more than magic the gathering arena, or artifact or anything else.

Because, unlike WoW, Blizzard listens the Hearthstone community.

UltraMega · Mar 14, 2019

JackCY said:
It's not a game people want to play.

Magic: The Gathering... they made sort of a one off rubbish I wouldn't play either and that saturated that market. Making more and more variants under different name won't magically bring more customers.

Valve had Half-Life and then Steam, the rest... what rest... not worth mentioning really. It was either a mod or bought from elsewhere.
Valve will sit on Steam until they keel over. All their explorations into AR, VR, ... some games no one wants to play... just a money dump.
HL3 that people want they do not want to make because they would need a damn good writer and team to build it, neither of which they have anymore.

Your logic is sound but you're overlooking one thing. Valve has outsourced Half Life games to other devs several times before, and they could definitely do it again with Half Life 3 if they wanted to.

I honestly believe the only reason we have not and probably will not get Half Life 3 is because GabeN is a terrible CEO. Valve got lucky with Steam. People hated it when it became tied to Half Life 2 and Counter Strike but that hate slowly morphed into appriciation for no longer having to deal with a pile of CDs and DVDs to play games, and has since enjoyed the profits that come with being the first widely used digital store for PC games. People have come to love steam so much that Valve gets this totally undeserved reputation as the holy grail of PC gaming when infact all they really are is a game dev that couldn't adapt to stay relavent in an age where loading screens every couple of hallways is no longer acceptable, when they had one of the biggest IP franchises available to them, and could not even figure out how to capitalize on it. GabeN probably could not tie down his ambitions for Hlaf Life 3 into a realistic development plan and burned out all of Valve's actual talent.

I wish Valve would just admit all they are is a digital store going forward, or license out they're IPs to devs that can actually manage to make games. GabeN to me is a salty old fart who got mad at the gaming community for saying he can't count to 3 too many times, and now he feels no commitment to the community and fans that made him and his company rich. None of the other big names in gaming have completely aboadon their projects when fans universally wanted it and finances were not an issue, at least as far as I know. Just thinking about that scenario seems crazy. The fact that Valve could not even get Half Life 3 off the ground with all the resources they have avilable to them is a testiment to just how terribly a company can be managed. Everything going for them and they still failed due to their own arrogance, and the complete lack of any pressure to deliver with Steam paying all of the bills.

ToTheSun! · Mar 14, 2019

UltraMega said:
GabeN to me is a salty old fart who got mad at the gaming community

You seem pretty salty yourself about the popularity, that you view as unmerited, of someone of which you hold such a passionately negative view.

The GabeN meme, that alludes to his celebrity, is based mostly on his work on Steam, rather than his contribution to the HL franchise; though, the latter is also worthy of praise, I believe, for bringing a successful template of storytelling and gameplay mechanics to the industry.

It seems to me his validity as a player in the market, and also as a representative of the company Valve, can be backed solely by his work on the most successful online game library (among other things that it is, something that a lot of people like to ignore when criticizing it).

To use Valve's failure to bring closure to the Freeman epopee, one of their many works, as the basis of smearing his professional persona is a little weird.

I don't think they'd ever "outsource" one of the chapters in the main story, especially the last one. They've only done that for spin-offs, whose canonical status is largely unimportant to the main plot. And it's not like they'd relinquish narration control altogether.

I see the absence of HL3 as a mystery, more so than the result of the direction from an arrogant, failing, salty old fart.

They don't have to admit anything; their actions speak for themselves. They're Steam first, developer second, because that's what can easily and unmistakably be seen. People simply romanticized the whole thing and got frustrated when the result was different. Whether they're trying to appease themselves or the shareholders is a more relevant question.

oxidized · Mar 14, 2019

ku4eto said:
Because, unlike WoW, Blizzard listens the Hearthstone community.

It's not that, it's only that hearthstone was the first and it's much more accessible to the average player and to the casual player.

UltraMega · Mar 15, 2019

ToTheSun! said:
You seem pretty salty yourself about the popularity, that you view as unmerited, of someone of which you hold such a passionately negative view.

The GabeN meme, that alludes to his celebrity, is based mostly on his work on Steam, rather than his contribution to the HL franchise; though, the latter is also worthy of praise, I believe, for bringing a successful template of storytelling and gameplay mechanics to the industry.

It seems to me his validity as a player in the market, and also as a representative of the company Valve, can be backed solely by his work on the most successful online game library (among other things that it is, something that a lot of people like to ignore when criticizing it).

To use Valve's failure to bring closure to the Freeman epopee, one of their many works, as the basis of smearing his professional persona is a little weird.

I don't think they'd ever "outsource" one of the chapters in the main story, especially the last one. They've only done that for spin-offs, whose canonical status is largely unimportant to the main plot. And it's not like they'd relinquish narration control altogether.

I see the absence of HL3 as a mystery, more so than the result of the direction from an arrogant, failing, salty old fart.

They don't have to admit anything; their actions speak for themselves. They're Steam first, developer second, because that's what can easily and unmistakably be seen. People simply romanticized the whole thing and got frustrated when the result was different. Whether they're trying to appease themselves or the shareholders is a more relevant question.

Oh it's you again.

Obviously my comment was highly sarcastic but the sentiment of it really isn't. There's nothing salty about being dissappointed in Valve for ditching game development completely, aside from a few very simple games that are riddle with micro transactions and gambling. Valve got lucky with the timing of steam, that they're only real claim to fame. Without steam, they would likely not even be in business today. If a different digital store had beat steam to the punch, steam would be the annoying extra program everyone hates on. I'm not going to pretend a company that made a few smart decision and got lucky on top of that, but has otherwise spent most of its life doing very little (especially considering their massive resources) is a good business. Valve survives because of steam. Steam exist because it was first. It's that simple.

Portal 2 was their last big game and it came out in 2011.

Valve is like a good friend that fell off the wagon and is just looking for the next fix in the form of hats and skins for gambling, while keeping people distracted from their addiction with random side projects.

ToTheSun! · Mar 15, 2019

UltraMega said:
Oh it's you again.

Hello.

UltraMega said:
Valve got lucky with the timing of steam, that they're only real claim to fame.

So, they're just like every single company in every single industry that pioneered something because of their ingenuity and sense of opportunity? Cool. I guess you really do make your own luck.

UltraMega said:
Valve is like a good friend that fell off the wagon

And that's EXACTLY the problem, one that I described in my previous post. They've never been anyone's friend. You romanticized the whole thing and now you're frustrated.

[Ars] Richard Garfield leaves Valve, puts Artifact’s future in question

tpi2007

Defoler

keikei

tpi2007

iamjanco

Mand12

EniGma1987

epic1337

ku4eto

nonametoclaim

JackCY

Omega X

skupples

oxidized

ku4eto

UltraMega

ToTheSun!

oxidized

UltraMega

ToTheSun!

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