Valve's Artifact is "a complex and challenging card game," said an 80/100 review in late 2018." Artifact's depth is not only noteworthy, but also does not significantly compromise accessibility." Despite this, and despite being the work of Valve, which has a fairly good track record of making games, it was a flop. Two months after its release, player numbers plummeted, and three months later, Twitch's Artifact category was a wasteland of pornography and memes.

Despite the fiasco, Valve boss Gabe Newell was almost sanguine about the experience in an interview with Edge Magazine (via GamesRadar). We were surprised. We thought it was a really strong product," he said.

Valve said a year ago that it wanted to give Artifact another shot, but has been virtually silent on the game since then; Artifact designers Richard Garfield and Skaff Elias also no longer work with Valve ： They were fired shortly after Artifact was released. However, according to Newell, Valve is still working on the game, and according to Edge, it has undergone such extensive changes that it is being called Artifact 2 within the company.

"We experimented and got negative results. We need to see if we learned anything from it, so let's do it again. That's what [the artifact team] is doing and preparing for release. From the reactions to it, what was wrong with the product? How was it? Let's fix those things and give it another go."

Perhaps coincidentally (I doubt it), Valve's Artifact team also posted their first update since March 2019.

"First of all, I want to thank you all for your tweets, emails, and posts, your continued interest in Artifact has been encouraging and I sincerely appreciate all the feedback!" He stated. 'We have begun testing our systems and infrastructure. This will not affect the production Artifact, but just to let you know, stay tuned for more news after the launch of Half-Life: Alix!"

Half-Life: By the way, Alyx will launch on March 23. We will keep you posted.