It felt like a game that demanded too much of your money to simply get by. Putting together an Artifact deck wasn't ostensibly more expensive than opening hundreds of Hearthstone packs, but on top of a pay-to-play model that further asked you to shell out to enter any mode that rewarded further cards. Physical card decks could be borrowed from friends, passed down when you're done, and give you a nice stack of physical goods to shove in a drawer. In practice, the best hero in the game, Axe, was selling for more than the game itself. In theory, it worked just like a physical card game-you buy starter packs, booster packs, and then head to a secondary market to pick out individual cards. The problem is that Valve wanted Artifact to be as much a market as it was a game, with every card listed on the Steam Community Market. It could be overwhelming, and often unfair, but it was a fascinating translation of the behemoth MOBA. A card game adaptation of Dota 2, it saw you fighting across three boards with both hero cards, minions and abilities arranged around Magic The Gathering-style colours.
I actually quite liked Artifact at launch. How quickly the world forgot about Artifact. What about the promise of crypto gaming? Of the idea that an in-game item is truly yours, to keep, to buy and resell as you see fit? This is frequently touted as the way crypto will change gaming. Bad handīut forget the scams for just a second. As the Steam Community Market has grown, Valve's learned it needs to take a more hands-on approach to keep fraud off its platform-a kind of increased regulation the decentralised world of crypto is fundamentally opposed to. It's hard not to make comparisons to NFT markets, where "pumping and dumping" and straight up art theft (whereby NFT sellers nick and resell art without consent) is common.
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A 2019 Guardian report tied "nearly all" trading taking place in that game to money laundering efforts, and with CS:GO skins sometimes selling for thousands of dollars, a controversial skin gambling scene began to develop around the game. TF2 was eventually supplanted by Counter-Strike: Global Offensive as Valve's most popular online shooter, in part because of its cosmetics economy. That said, Steam's own market wasn't safe from fraud. But it also formalised a community that had been simmering for years-a culture that used idle servers and trawled games with promotional items to increase their digital hat investment portfolio.
Steam helped legitimise this market, bringing it under official control and adding security to real-money payments by facilitating them through Steam's payment process.