Artifact

Was it actually bad compared to other games in its genre, or were people just disappointed that it was Valve releasing a game like this?

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It had some cool ideas but it died due to the abysmal monetization model.

>basic TCG monetization is abysmal
unironically yes, you can't make it work anymore

is right, bought it when it came out, had fun until I realized that I have to shill out dosh for cards.
have to admit I did enjoy all the little tidbits of worldbuilding and fulff on the cards. the tripleboard was also neat imo

Where is the artifact fag

It was bad. Even if you ignore the monetization problems it had, the core game just sucked. Games were long and boring as fuck without much option for interesting decks or strategies (didn't the game only have like 200 cards total or something dumb?).

they thought it would be a good idea to make you have to buy in, and they did a horrible job of explaining it
if they released it with the draft and free play modes free to play it might not have died, but it was also incredibly stressful to play since each game was ridiculously close and the whole time was spent reacting to the enemy and the random directions of the arrows that might completely fuck you over and force you to change your strategy on a dime
I don't know if the reboot version that was also abandoned immediately had the same problem, but it also made the whole game less interesting and I didn't launch it more than twice

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Yes and no.

It's concept was well thought out, but how it was pulled off was poor. It wasn't even bad in the sense that you can point to any single part of the game (Other than randomized shops) and say, "This is bad," it's just the entire structure was flawed and failed to actually be an interesting, fun game.

One of the problems was the one-sided nature of how any given turn would play out. By the game's design, one player would usually wind up monopolizing the actions of a given turn. This would result in the other player just sitting there and being a punching bag until the draw phase came about again, which wasn't fun in the slightest. In this same situation in other games, it usually resulted in a quick loss, so the situation was avoided by the game ending, but in Artifact, you chipped away at the enemy tower/ancient until your opponent could mount a defense or you finished him off. This also occurred because a lot of times, you'd want to wait and build up your hand to blow a lot of cards at once and sweep the enemy units off the board, so you'd have a lot of "empty" turns before having one where you made an opening and something happened.

The shop phase at the end of a turn was awful, you could buy the top card of your item deck, at which point you could buy the next item in line and so forth, or you could buy a random cheap consumable. Because there was literally only one item from your deck available to buy at any given time, you would get incredibly screwed if it happened to be a 20+ gold item on your first turn, even if you had six or eight cheaper items--it was literally luck of the draw with no real mitigation to it. Drawing cards to your hand though had you draw three at a time or more, so that helped normalize draws there at least.

Go play it, both versions are free. The second one has even a small story mode. Imo I think the games were really fun, but the first one with the TCG model felt like someone spat on your face. Or at least that is how most people took it it seems. Second version was way better and it hurts but.... too many people were still mad about the entire idea and the community who cared was too small.

in pic, best waifu

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Hero and card balance was all over the place. I get that it's a card game and this will always be the case especially as new cards get introduced, but Artifact's was purposely bad in order to make some cards more valuable than others for the marketplace. For a game where people tend to gravitate towards certain heroes and are used to all of them being more or less viable, this is exceptionally bad design because now there's no reason to use your two star rarity hero in place of a straight up better one.

There was also an issue with some abilities and cards having a strong RNG focus (Such as one hero giving every ally a 50% chance to not die when dealt a killing blow). This made for a lot of frustrating matches where you'd pour attacks on a hero and lose every coinflip, deciding the game right there even if you made no bad moves.

Artifact would've died even if it was completely free. The monitization model might've not done it any favors, but you actually have to have a game people want to play before that enters into the picture at all anyway.