Valve kills Artifact 2.0, gives away all game cards for free

Valve's failed DOTA card game has been put on ice, and is now free-to-play on Steam.

Artifact is officially dead, and Valve has cancelled all plans on a reboot. The reason? Artifact's playerbase simply didn't pick up, and Valve is no longer wanting to invest resources or manpower on the game (they're working on other things, including more Half-Life games). As a result, Valve has made Artifact completely free-to-play and removed all microtransactions from the card game. When's the last time you saw a publisher do something like that?

"It's now been about a year and a half since the current Artifact team began work on a reboot in earnest. While we're reasonably satisfied we accomplished most of our game-side goals, we haven't managed to get the active player numbers to a level that justifies further development at this time. As such, we've made the tough decision to stop development on the Artifact 2.0 Beta."

As an added bonus, every Artifact card is 100% free. Anyone who bought the game, or card packs, will have their cards converted into special versions that can be sold on the Steam marketplace.

Here's an overview of our final changes to Artifact Classic:

• The game is free for everyone to play.
• All players get every card for free. You will no longer be able to buy card packs.
• Paid players' existing cards have been converted into special Collector's Edition versions, which will remain marketable. Marketplace integration has been removed from the game.
• Paid event tickets have been removed.
• Customers who paid for the game will still earn packs of Collector's Edition cards for playing; players who got the game for free will not.

The final release of Artifact Foundry looks like this:

• The game is free for everyone to play.
• Players gain access to cards by playing the game. All cards are earned this way; no cards or packs will be for sale and Artifact Foundry cards are not marketable.
• All final card art that was in the pipeline is now in the game.