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As we ring in the new year at the beginning of this week, thousands of people it seemed celebrating in an unusual way: playing Valve’s 2018 TCG Artifact.
Then, just as quickly as it started, 12,000 people stopped playing all at once on January 3rd, leaving the game as empty as late 2024.
Who were these people? Nobody seems to know. The The Artifact community has not reported a sudden surge in interestand no one is talking about the game on social media other than being surprised by the sudden jump in player numbers.
So why is it? SteamDB suggesting a free-to-play card game that, by all accounts, near deadseeing wild spikes in users over very specific two-day periods?
As Forbes has observedArtifact Classic (the original, now free version of Artifact) experienced a sudden spike in player count on December 31st, from a measly ~200 concurrent players to over 5,000 before climbing to a high of over 12,000. The artifact was at 11,000 concurrently the second before its player count dropped completely to ~150 at midnight on January 3rd. The strange thing is that almost the same thing happened earlier this month: on December 14th, the number of players rose to around 14,000, stayed there for about two days, and then dipped into the hundreds again on the 17th.
So what’s really going on here? The real answer is that no one has really he knows The dominant theory in the community seems to be bots, although why someone would train bots to play Artifact is unclear. One person suggested that someone was training an AI to play the game “for shits and giggles“Maybe that’s as good an explanation as any. Another person suggested it’s nails cheat bots increase playing time in random games to make their Steam accounts look legit other goals.
Another theory voiced by several members of the Artifact subreddit is that the increase in players is due to pirates. Since some video games require Steam authentication, in order to pirate those games, pirates will use the AppID/SDK of a different free game to think they have a genuine Steam copy. In this case, it is suggested that they are using Artifact. That said, this theory doesn’t quite hold up because of the very sudden spikes and then very specific declines in activity.
So the real answer behind Artifact’s mysterious player numbers remains a mystery for now. We reached out to Valve for comment, but did not hear back prior to publication. What’s clear is that, at the very least, despite the numbers, Artifact itself isn’t generating significant real-world interest in Valve four years after its launch. he effectively quiteven the game itself it was pretty fun at first. At least the bots, if they really are bots, don’t seem to bother legitimate players in Artifact, unlike in Artifact. The ongoing situation has ended in Team Fortress 2.
Rebekah Valentine is a senior reporter at IGN. You can find her post on BlueSky @duckvalentine.bsky.social. Got a story tip? Send it to rvalentine@ign.com.
