Artifact saw a mysterious player count jump over new year, six years after Valve’s trading card game died off

Last June, Valve’s trading card game Artifact Classic peaked at 78 players. November was a little rosier for the abandoned multiplayer game, with a monthly peak of 1,028. Then, on New Year’s Day, that number jumped to 11,900 players on Steam – its second highest concurrent besides launch. Soon after, they vanished. Who were these mysterious shufflers, flocking to the deserted, echoing halls of Valve’s disastrous flop like your mate who uses the word ‘liminal’ too much to a dead shopping center? Forbes, who first reported on the phenomena, don’t know. No one knows. Somebody might actually know but writing ‘no one knows’ makes it more dramatic. Let’s dig in.

This latest 24 peak of 12,500 players echoes a uptick last December of around 14,000, which lasted but a single day. Forbes speculate that the reason is “likely bots” in the absence of any notable community or influencer activity on Twitch, YouTube, or similar. There’s no interest in Artifact’s cards on the Marketplace, say Forbes, so unless Valve is hiding something Half Life 3 related, there’s no clear reason why this should be happening. Unless…

The game’s subreddit has been doing some theorising of its own, as reported by IGN. Is Artifact being used to train AI? Are there scammer bots increasing their playtime to build legitimacy for other, nefarious purposes? Could it be pirates using the free-to-play game’s AppID/SDK to mask other games – an honour, according to one poster, usually reserved for Spacewar?

Paul Curtin digs into this here, but the basic idea is that pirates will give cracked games the AppID of the game Spacewar, which used to be part of Steamworks’ software dev kit as a testing tool. The pirated game then shows up as Spacewar to Steam, which then does whatever the platform equivalent of a slightly suspicious British Bobby deciding to move along casually twirling their baton and whistling is.

If you’re interested in diving into Artifact’s deflating history, Will Partin’s brilliant piece for Waypoint remains the definitive chronicle. The game ceased development and went free-to-play back in 2021, with Valve saying “we haven’t managed to get the active player numbers to a level that justifies further development at this time.”

Valve’s newest multiplayer offering is Deadlock, which Matt Cox wrote about here.