[Update #2]: Valve is ceasing all development on Artifact and Artifact 2.0.

[Update]: Artifact 2.0 has been announced. There aren't many details just yet, but there will be a beta soon!

As of right now, Valve's card game Artifact only has about 200 concurrent players, while the daily peak is hovering around a rather measly 800. To say that Artifact failed to meet Valve's, or even the community's expectations, would be quite an understatement. However, while the statistics may be grim, there is a glimmer of hope on the horizon.

According to the most recent developer update, Valve is now no longer working on simply patching Artifact, but rather on reworking it from the ground up. While the details are still nonexistent, you can expect to see drastic changes to the game design, the economy, as well as the social experience while in a match.

"Obviously, things didn't turn out how we hoped," reads the brief update. "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."

"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. "

While this is certainly a drastic move, I do believe it is the correct one. Artifact's issues run far too deep to fix with a couple of updates, and a slow drip-feed of content is unlikely to please anyone. So while it certainly sucks for current players to have to wait for months for Valve to fix Artifact, I do believe a full re-release is its only real chance at salvation.

Once Valve shares more information I'll make sure to let you know, but until then I'm afraid all we can really do is wait and see what happens with Artifact. I can only hope they'll go with a more sensible in-game economy this time around.