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...