Deadlock – a game which is yet to actually be announced in any official way, shape or form – had a concurrent player peak of over 16,000 this weekend.
At the time of writing, the game’s peak is sitting at 16,947 players on Steam, with 4,714 people playing it at this very moment in time.
I tried to install it myself via a little tab on SteamDB just now, but was met with the message: “An error occurred while launching this game: Game configuration unavailable.” I was then taken back to the Steam app’s main page.
So, what exactly is Deadlock? Well, it’s Valve’s hero shooter. But, like I said, the Half-Life maker still hasn’t confirmed that it even exists, let alone that it is in some form of playable state.
Leaked details of Deadlock started appearing earlier this year via images posted to social media, along with a report from long term Valve reporter Tyler McVicker. This report claimed that Deadlock was an Overwatch-style third-person hero shooter, with closed testing taking place.
McVicker described the project as having MOBA and tower defence-inspired elements. It’s “like Valorant, Overwatch, Dota 2 and Team Fortress 2 had a baby,” the reporter said in May.
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Later that same month, gameplay footage from the shooter (which has a sci-fi setting) also leaked. This particular footage showed off Deadlock’s training mode, a number of its hero characters, and the existence of BioShock Infinite-style skyrails players will be able to hook onto and ride around on.
More recently, in June, Valve filed to trademark Deadlock, with the intention to cover a number of categories including (but certainly not limited to) providing online video games and video game education.
Hopefully, we will hear something more concrete and official on Deadlock soon. Eurogamer will keep you posted as soon as we know more.