Valve ends development on Artifact 2.0

The developer has made both versions of the game available for free.

PC giant Valve has halted work on its Dota card game Artifact.

In a post on Steam, the firm said that while it was happy with the changes it had made to the game, Artifact wasn't bringing in enough players to make it worth investing more time and money into development.

Valve has said that it will make both the original version of the game – Artifact Classic – and the beta for the updated version - now called Artifact Foundry - available free of charge. The firm says that both games are playable and won't be receiving any gameplay updates, but points out that Foundry is technically a work-in-progress so doesn't have all art and lacks polish.

"It's now been about a year and a half since the current Artifact team began work on a reboot in earnest," the news post said.

"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."

Valve rolled out Artifact in November 2018 and despite having an initially promising launch, the title saw a steep decline in concurrent players on Steam. In March 2020, the company said that it was rebooting the game, later taking away the ability for players to buy and sell cards in Artifact and adding a single-player campaign to the game.