Valve's Dead TCG Artifact Suddenly Had 12,000 Players on New Year's Day, and the Community Is Baffled

ign.com:

As we rang in the new year earlier this week, thousands of people seemed to be celebrating in an admittedly unusual way: by playing Valve's 2018 TCG Artifact.

Then, as quickly as they started, the 12,000-ish individuals all stopped playing at once on January 3, leaving the game as empty as it had been at the end of 2024.

Who were these people? No one seems to know. The Artifact community isn't reporting any sudden spikes in interest, and no one's really talking about the game on social media apart from marveling at the sudden jump in player numbers.

So why, then, is SteamDB suggesting that a free-to-play card game that is, by all accounts, close to dead, seeing wild spikes in users over very specific two-day periods?

As spotted by Forbes, Artifact Classic's (the original, now free-to-play version of Artifact) player count suddenly spiked on December 31, jumping from a measly ~200 concurrent players up to the 5,000s, before spiking to a height of over 12,000. Artifact remained at around 11,000 concurrents through the second, before its playercount absolutely tanked back down to ~150 at midnight on January 3rd. What's strange is that something almost exactly like this happened earlier this month, too: on December 14, player counts shot up to around 14,000, hung out there for about two days, and dive bombed again into the hundreds on the 17th.

So what's really going on here? The actual answer is that no one really knows. The most prevalent community theory seems to be that it's bots, though why someone would train bots to play Artifact isn't exactly clear. One person suggested someone was training an AI to play the game "for shits and giggles" which is perhaps as good an explanation as any. Another person suggested the spikes were due to scam bots increasing playtime in random games in order to make their Steam accounts look legitimate for other purposes.

Another theory pointed out by multiple members of the Artifact subreddit is that the spike in players is due to pirates.