Thousands of people attended as we welcomed the fresh year earlier this week it seemed celebrate in a truly extraordinary way: by playing Valve’s Artifact TCG 2018.
Then, as quickly as they started, on January 3, everyone, approximately 12,000 people, stopped playing, leaving the game as empty as it was in delayed 2024.
Who were these people? Nobody seems to know. The The Artifacts community is not reporting any sudden spikes in interestand no one is really talking about the game on social media other than being amazed at the sudden boost in player numbers.
So why is this so? SteamDB are you suggesting that a free-to-play card game that is, by all accounts, on the brink of death and sees a spike in users during very specific two-day periods?
As Forbes noted.the number of players in Artifact Classic (the original, now free version of Artifact) suddenly spiked on December 31, jumping from a measly ~200 concurrent players to 5,000 before skyrocketing to over 12,000. Artifact stayed at around 11,000 concurrent sessions for a full second , before the player count dropped completely to around 150 at midnight on January 3. The strange thing is that something almost exactly like this also happened earlier this month: on December 14, the number of players increased to around 14,000, who spent about two days there, and on December 17 they again bombed into the hundreds.
So what’s really going on here? The correct answer is that no one Really he knows. The most prevalent community theory seems to be that these are bots, although it’s not entirely clear why anyone would train bots to play Artifact. One person suggested that someone is training an AI to play this game”for shitting and giggling“, which is perhaps as good an explanation as any. Another person suggested that the spikes were caused fraudulent bots that boost play time in random games to make their Steam accounts appear legitimate other purposes.
Another theory pointed out by many members of the Artefakt subreddit is that the edged boost in player numbers is due to pirates. Since some video games require Steam authentication to be pirated, pirates will employ the AppID/SDK of another free game to trick Steam into thinking they have a real copy. In this case, it is implied that they are using an Artifact. That said, this theory is not entirely true due to extremely sudden spikes and then drops in activity at very precise times.
So the actual answer to Artifact’s mysterious player numbers remains a mystery for now. We reached out to Valve for comment but did not receive a response in time for publication. At the very least, it’s clear that despite the numbers, Artifact itself doesn’t seem to be gaining any significant real-world traction eight years after its release and four years after Valve effectively announced its termination, even though the game itself was quite fun in the first place. At least the bots, if they are indeed bots, don’t seem to be bothering legitimate players in Artifact, unlike the intermittent interruptions in Team Fortress 2.
Rebekah Valentine is a senior reporter for IGN. Her posts can be found on BlueSky @duckvalentine.bsky.social. Have a story tip? Send it to rvalentine@ign.com.
