It seems like the common wisdom in Artifact is that the economic model was bad. I think Zvi is correct in saying, Artifact was just not a good enough game.
Personally, I enjoy fairly complex games, and I’m willing to spend money to try games out. But I just found that Artifact was way too complicated to be enjoyable. It is hard to follow what’s going on while watching a stream on Twitch.
If Artifact was fun but expensive, it could have found a core that loved playing it. But no, there are more people streaming and watching the indie card game Slay the Spire (which isn’t free to play) nowadays on Twitch, than there are people watching Artifact.
So I don’t think the biggest problem was the price; the biggest problem was the gameplay.
It's also a rogue-lite, which are the most streamable types of games.
Games where you're winning up until the point of losing (Slay the spire, Fortnite) are easy for a person watching to answer, "Is this person winning?" because they answer is always yes.
Tuning into someone playing Dota, CSGO or a cardgame that is harder to answer, because they have to know enough about the current game-state (often both visible and hidden) including past states to make that judgement.
Slay the spire has fun amounts of randomness with a seriously challenging top-end difficulty. (The world's best have a ~30% win rate against A20 hearts).
But STS is also single player, and it's not really a card game in the pure sense. The player is playing cards but critically, and this is key to the balance and fun of STS, the opponent is not.
The computer never tries to play cards, which means it never tries and fails to be good at playing cards. The enemies movesets have almost nothing to do with card playing which has leant the developers the freedom to explore some really unique and fun enemies such as the reptomancer which spawns more and more minions or the spaghetti monster which can add curses (negative cards) to the player deck permanently, or the transient smoke monster where you're not supposed to kill it's 999hp because it runs away after a few turns anyway.
That wouldn't be possible in a game where the enemies were designed to use the actual cards, because it would risk that power creeping into the player, which would inevitably eventually win.
This form of deck-builder where it's only the player playing a card game is the real breakthrough that STS made, it breaks all the rules of deck builders but still works.
That combined with the streambility means that it supports a few streamers who stream almost uniquely slay the spire.
Personally, I enjoy fairly complex games, and I’m willing to spend money to try games out. But I just found that Artifact was way too complicated to be enjoyable. It is hard to follow what’s going on while watching a stream on Twitch.
If Artifact was fun but expensive, it could have found a core that loved playing it. But no, there are more people streaming and watching the indie card game Slay the Spire (which isn’t free to play) nowadays on Twitch, than there are people watching Artifact.
So I don’t think the biggest problem was the price; the biggest problem was the gameplay.