Valve’s next game, which has not yet been officially announced, had over 16,000 concurrent players over the weekend. At the time of writing, that number is at 22,400 via SteamDB. The game is called deadlock and we’ve known for some time that Valve was working on it, but now it seems like we’re in the middle of a soft launch of sorts.
This game hasn’t been officially announced by the company yet either, but there’s definitely something going on. It’s likely that Valve has released the game for test runs to gauge how successful the title could be with a proper PR campaign, as they say. Eurogamer and others. These numbers are certainly impressive when you consider deadlock still needs to be confirmed by the company.
So what is deadlock? It is a competitive MOBA shooter, touted as “the next Dota” by veteran Valve reporter Tyler McVicker. It is said to have been in development since 2018 and is a partnership with IceFrog, an unnamed developer who was originally behind the original Defence of the Elders Mod by Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos that’s how it all started Dota Mania.
After all, deadlock is already in an advanced stage of development considering the high number of simultaneous players. McVicker describes it as “like Brave, Watch, Dota2 And TeamFortress2 had a baby.”
Since testers have started sharing screenshots of Deadlock everywhere, here are a few that I can verify, featuring one of the heroes named Grey Talon. pic.twitter.com/KdZSRxObSz
— Gabe Follower (@gabefollower) 17 May 2024
After this article was originally published, a writer from Engadget received an invite to playtest and can confirm many of the leaked details about the game. There are currently 20 heroes to choose from, and you can enter a sandbox mode to try out each of them. You can also browse ongoing games to watch and get a better feel for things before you’re ready to dive in. The playtest build shows that the servers are open for at least 12 hours every day.
Although Valve has not yet officially announced, deadlockprobably expecting a surprise of some sort, the company trademarked the name in June. So that’s something. With over 22,000 parallels, it won’t be long before we all know a lot more about this game.
Update, August 13, 3:30 p.m. ET: This story was updated after publication with a brief statement from Valve’s deadlock Playtest included. The concurrent player count in the headline and article has also been updated to reflect the game’s current player count. The original article stated there were over 16,000 players.
