Why this game bombed so hard?

Why this game bombed so hard?
I have never played the game, but the beta testers seemed to love it and praise the gameplay. It can't be just the fault of stupid monetization system, tho it is probably a not small reason.

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Despite it's interesting structure, it required a purchase and was a couple years late to be a stronge competitor to the rest of the F2P card games. I was looking forward to it and it's unfortunate things went the way they did, but it's easy to see why it couldn't compete with Hearthstone, Shadowverse, or MTG Arena

I personally hated the fact that if both people knew what they were doing, games would go on for 40+ minutes

It failed to recognize that the digital platform has a different audience than a physical trading card game. Nobody wants to be forced to buy-in for a digital TCG.
Also I heard it's not very viewer-friendly, which greatly limits its exposure.

Eat shit bruno carlucci AKA icefrog stupid argentinian homosexual you motherfucker piece of shit hope you get fired

The beta testers were being paid to play, and Valve have a legendary status not listening to the community properly or doing anything positive with that feedback
Garriot probably had too much pull on star power, as Valve is all just star power and no leadership, so "RNG early game then RNG mid-game with snowballing during those two phases of the game sucks major dick and late game is only a thing when RNG swings the game to the losing side at the last minute" didn't come across to them as bad game design until Gariott got his money and left.

It's designed to appeal to an incredibly specific niche. Not people who like DotA and card games mind you, but people who specifically like DotA lore enough to seek it outside the game mechanics and who like a narrow subset of high complexity slow paced card card games. Everyone that fits into that niche is playing it already, but Valve forgot that this needed a wider appeal for how much effort had to go into making a digital card game compete.

Wait, he's brazilian now? I though Icecunt was an arab.

It cost money to buy and wasn't free and secondly nobody expected this less popular genre from valve so it was hated from the start by people that don't play card games

Simply calling it a "stupid monetization system" doesn't do it justice. They wanted you to shell out $20, and pay for additional cards, AND pay to play certain modes. That might not necessarily detract from the quality of a game, but it will absolutely have a negative impact on sales because mainstream gamers are going to be turned off by that (especially in a niche genre like a card game).

This, on top of the fact that there are "free to play" alternatives. Aside from the monetization system, the second biggest problem Artifact had is that it was about 5 years late to the "card game" party and was entering a relatively crowded area for such a niche genre.

Valve showed their inadequate competence at maintaining live-service games. Had they matched today's standards in content delivery and communication the game would've fared way better, but instead they chose to put their game in fate unknown, alienating the entire fanbase, exacerbated by haters that hound the community to no end.

It was a service problem.

>but the beta testers seemed to love it and praise the gameplay
Really? Thats not what I read the weeks before release. Outside of the major valve fanboys and people believing it was going to be a bitcoin like marketplace, quite a few beta testers said that the game had very long and drawn out matches and was exhausting after just a game or 2. some said the gameplay mechanics were boring and very RNG dependent, and most said that constructed really only have 2 viable decks, and preferred to play draft/gauntlet.

I guess most of them thought valve was going to fix it after beta, but seems to not be the case.

> It can't be just the fault of stupid monetization system
the game just wasn't fun or enjoyable, games don't lose 99.9% of the playerbase within months due to a $20 price tag and $2.50 loot cases.

Don't forget about people who like or at least don't mind competitive games heavily influenced by RNG. I think a lot of these fans of high complexity slow paced card card games don't like RNG, so there you have another specific niche

It's a fun card game, but the buy in is too steep even for a physical cardgame(most IRL gamestore worth a damn have free sample decks of the top games that they will give away to new customers that show interest).
Also game lacked a good variety of formats for something you pay into. To put it bluntly, shit needed another year in the oven.

>people are waiting for years for a new and amazing singleplayer experience well worth their money
>Release another cheaply made lootbox machine

Gee i wonder why

there'll be an unannounced valve game coming out with Index.

Valve is shit at making games

>It was a service problem.

Nah. Game isn't fun, required too much money to buy into, and games take too long to play. Also there's too much RNG and magic etc players hate not being able to choose attack targets.

The game itself is bad, and it was flatline dead out of the gate.

Expect Artifact to return without the concept of the 3 lanes very soon, and with more magic-like rules concerning attacking. Also f2p.

Speaking of the 3 lanes, what do you guys think about them? Valve liked to tell that Artifact isn't just a dota card game, but the 3 lanes are cleary put here because dota has 3 lines. Could they made it into an interesting concept or is it just too convoluted from a base point idea?

Because it's another iteration of the slow, artificial resource-based TCG, gimmicks nonwithstanding.
Games that use mana are just boring and uninteresting.

Just play yugioh.

>It can't be just the fault of stupid monetization system
Well... it is.

Duelyst is the only good card game

I really wish there were YGO clones on the market. Love the play style but the game is miserable to play in practice

Icefrog is still a towelhead. The other user is just retarded.

>but the beta testers seemed to love it and praise the gameplay.

user no. Several professional TCG players that got invited to the beta gave Valve pages of things that needed to be fixed, valve ignored every one of them

Thats what I love about it.

Too much RNG beyond the card mechanic.
Shitty monetization.
Released despite 6+ months of people hammering in the first two points.

Because they went full greed with the game. First you had to buy it for 20 dollars. After that the only way to get new cards was to either buy them from the market or a new pack with random cards. There was no way of grinding new cards/packs like there are in every other TCG game. But that's not even worst part of it. The absolute worst part of the game was the dumb ass ticket system, where you had to buy tickets with real money and only after that were you allowed to partake in competitive modes.

Also valve banked hard on content creators to market the game for them. The game is not enjoyable or easy to watch. There's a reason why hearthstone streamers are so popular, it's a easy fucking game to follow, and you know when something big happens in it.

felt like it should be a beta when it "released"
no proper ladder, no progression, also pretty poor balance

and its sad because i fucking loved this game but there were like 2 meta decks that absolutely dominated everything and thats it. You don't "just" release a game like that without letting large amount of people playtest it. 2 months of open beta with A LOT of balance changes and this game would still be allive

I think it's pointless having 3 lanes, like its forced because dota has 3 lanes.

yea the meme arrows could often just decide a game (will my big 15/15 card hit their tower or that 1/1 creep?)

It was bad.

The game is good and bad depending on the format, we have some really good formats and we had some really bad formats, even just in 2018. I really hope Dark Matter and Azathoth get cleaned up this banlist, both of those are just too degenerate.

Cloning yugioh is hard, because most people who don't play a lot of yugioh don't really understand why how it works as a card game. The thing that sets yugioh apart from every other game is the extra deck. You can access certain (powerful) cards whenever you want and this is reflected in everything. You (usually) don't build your deck around power things in the main deck, you build it so you can access the resources you have in the extra deck. Which means being able to consistently make plays is valued over everything else.
And you have the means in deck building to reach a near 100% consistency rate, that every hand you draw goes into something decent.

>Nobody wants to be forced to buy-in for a digital TCG
Does anyone want to be forced to buy video games at all?

duelyst is just hearthstone with a grid
the only thing that redeemed it was that they weren't afraid to make cards flashy. A 6 mana 6/6 windfury with deathrattle: summon 6 1/1s would never make it into hearthstone, for example, and it's not that good of a card in duelyst

Fact: all digital card games should be replaced with VS-based xcom clones with very big loadout lists instead.

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