Finally, An Update on Artifact: No Updates in the Near Future!

If you've been hoping and waiting for an update to Artifact, well... you've got one! The update isn't great, Valve has basically admitted that a lot of things went wrong with the game and they are going back to the drawing board for some major issue addressing. There's no time frame on how long this update of the game will take other than: "we expect this process of experimentation and development to take a significant amount of time". That is very vague and could mean six months, or could mean over a year. At the end of the day, it's not looking great for Artifact in the short-term.

When we launched Artifact, we expected it would be the beginning of a long journey, that it would lay the foundation for years to come. Our plan was to immediately dive into our normal strategy of shipping a series of updates driven by the dialogue community members were having with each other and with us.

Obviously, things didn't turn out how we hoped. Artifact represents the largest discrepancy between our expectations for how one of our games would be received and the actual outcome. But we don't think that players misunderstand our game, or that they're playing it wrong. Artifact now represents an opportunity for us to improve our craft and use that knowledge to build better games.

Since launch, we've been looking carefully at how players interact with the game as well as gathering feedback. It has become clear that there are deep-rooted issues with the game and that our original update strategy of releasing new features and cards would be insufficient to address them. Instead, we believe the correct course of action is to take larger steps, to re-examine the decisions we've made along the way regarding game design, the economy, the social experience of playing, and more.

So what does this mean?

Moving forward, we'll be heads-down focusing on addressing these larger issues instead of shipping updates. While we expect this process of experimentation and development to take a significant amount of time, we’re excited to tackle this challenge and will get back to you as soon as we are ready.

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