It's one step from love to hatred

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In late November, a new project has joined Valve's list of games. Brandishing a pretentious name Artifact, this newcomer was a CCG set in the Dota 2 universe. However, due to a number of problems, this collectible card game was met with anything but acclaim, and over the time it managed to lose all the attention it struggled to earn.

Before the release of Artifact, many took interest in a new creation of Seattle guys. This can be clearly seen thanks to the Preview Tournament, which was organized by Valve themselves. A special tournament with invited esports players gathered a fairly large audience with an average amount being slightly over 30 thousand viewers. However, in less than a month, the “Hearthstone Killer” lost almost all the attention and during the Artifact Mighty the numbers dropped to an average of 15 thousand viewers.

What this meant was not only a failure on Valve's part, but also potential future problems for all players that have already acquired the game. Such a conclusion could be made both at the beginning of December and in vicinity of New Year's Eve. Every passing day, the average online presence of this CCG on the streaming platform was on a steady decline. This can be clearly seen on the statistics we collected. The graph perfectly shows that most of the time this gaming project is effectively being pushed to the very outskirts of the platform in terms of popularity.

During three weeks, Artifact has descended all the way to the second page of Twitch, while its main competitor in the market effortlessly kept its position in the top. A similar trend was shown by streamers' interest to this product: over the time the average number of channels that broadcasted the game has declined to an incredibly low amount.

When it comes to an example demonstrating this problem, it takes 9 viewers on average for a player to get in the first line of Russian broadcasts. To compare, if a player wants to get into top six spots of Russian-language League of Legends channels' list, he would need at least 100 viewers. This clearly shows that, despite all the statements, the game has failed to make a foothold even within the CIS region.

As a result, it is plausible to claim that Artifact has flopped as early as one month after the release. The game did not obtain a large player following. In addition, even the basic interest from the community did not last a week, because of which the future of Valve's new creation now hangs in the balance.