Officially, Valve—the company behind Steam, Half-Life, and more—has yet to announce its next big game. However, thousands of people are currently playing and posting about Deadlock, Valve’s next big game , literally right now. So uh, what’s going on? Thanks to leakers and dataminers , we’ve known about a Valve-developed multiplayer game for a few years now.
Before it was Deadlock, it was likely codenamed Neon Prime. At one point since it reportedly started development in 2018, the MOBA/character shooter hybrid was possibly going to be set in the Half-Life/Portal universe , but that has seemingly changed based on gameplay leaks that occurred in May. Now, it seems a rumored playtest for Deadlock is currently underway, with the game developing a community of players on Reddit.
As spotted by IGN, over on SteamDB—a third-party website that tracks various stats about Steam games and players— Deadlock’s player count has been steadily increasing over the last few months. In the last few days, the game cracked 18,000 concurrent players. That means it’s one of the top 65 most played games on Steam, and Valve has yet to even tweet about it or release a trailer.
Deadlock. Next Valve game. Over 200k players have access.
Concurrent online heading towards 20k. Game not even announced. How can this be real? pic.
twitter.com/zESnC1K6Mf — Gabe Follower (@gabefollower) August 11, 2024 IGN reports that Deadlock’s current early access period is using an invite system, lett.