Mysterious Bot Activity Sparks 12,000 Player Surge in Abandoned Valve Game Artifact

Valve's Dead Card Game Artifact Just Had 12,000 Players Show Up Out of Nowhere In a bizarre twist for a game that's been basically dead since 2021, Artifact hit over 12,000 players on New Year's Day. The weirdest part? No one was actually playing it. Steam's numbers show the abandoned card game jumped from its usual couple hundred players to thousands overnight on December 31st. Then on January 3rd, like clockwork, they all vanished.
The same thing happened just weeks ago - around 14,000 players popped up on December 14th, stuck around for exactly two days, then disappeared on the 17th. Something doesn't add up here. The game's small but dedicated community hasn't seen any new faces in matches. The trade channels are still ghost towns. It's like these thousands of players exist only in Steam's numbers. Reddit's best guess? Bots. The player count stays suspiciously flat during these spikes - no ups and downs like you'd see with real people logging in and out.
Some think it might be pirates using Artifact to trick Steam's authentication, but the way everyone logs off at the exact same time makes even that theory shaky. Valve hasn't said anything about what's going on here. We asked, but they haven't gotten back to us. For those who don't remember, Artifact crashed and burned pretty spectacularly after launch in 2018. Players hated having to buy cards with real money on top of the $20 entry fee. Valve eventually made it free-to-play in 2021 before pulling the plug on development completely.