Richard Garfield leaves Valve, puts Artifact’s future in question

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  At the most zoomed-out level, every Artifact match begins like this: with three lanes of combat, across which you will arrange five heroes in a mission to destroy towers. Sure sounds a lot like how Dota 2 works, doesn't it? (Not shown here: the "flop" of your creeps that are randomly added and arranged between every round.)

Richard Garfield, the legendary game designer behind Magic: The Gathering, says he has been laid off from Valve as part of a recent modest downsizing effort at the company. The move comes as Artifact, Valve's Dota 2-based card game which Garfield worked on closely, struggles to find a continuing audience.

"We weren't surprised by the layoff considering how rocky the launch was," Garfield told Artifact-focused site Artibuff. "The team was enthusiastic about the game and were confident that they had a good product, but it became clear it wasn't going to be easy to get the game to where we wanted it."

Garfield goes on to suggest that a smaller Artifact team makes some sense now that the game has been launched and that Valve has probably already maximized the value to be gleaned from Garfield's contract company, 3 Donkeys.

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