Since the first leaks about Deadlock surfaced in May, Valve’s next game has been in a strange limbo: it has hundreds of gameplay videos, a public subreddit, and a peak player count of over 44,000 thanks to invites handed out like candy, including to the tracking site Steam SteamDB Database. However, the studio itself has refused to acknowledge the game’s existence until today. Deadlock has Steam Store Pageand we can finally talk about it and share clips, as if that’s ever stopped anyone before.
The Deadlock store page is very scant – if you want to have any idea what it’s about, you’re better off watching it on YouTube – but it’s there something. There’s a teaser video, some extremely low-res key art, and plenty of reminders that Deadlock is a work in progress. “Deadlock is an early-stage multiplayer game,” its main description reads. “Early development: Deadlock is still in early development with a lot of temporary art and experimental gameplay.” You can’t even wishlist it.
Valve focused account Gabe’s Watcher shared a screenshot from the Discord announcement for X’s game, “The Everything App.” In it, a Valve employee named Yoshi (I don’t think those are the real Yoshis) announces that the game’s gag rule has been lifted:
“We are lifting the Deadlock public discussion rules to allow for things like streaming, social media sites, and discussions.
Nothing else is changing in our development state. We remain invite-only and are still in early development with a lot of temporary art and experimental gameplay.
While this is certainly a welcome change—we’ve played Deadlock ourselves and would love to write about it here at PC Gamer dot com—it doesn’t really change much about Deadlock in practice. The game is out there, people are playing it, watching it, and talking about it, and if you’re lucky, a friend might throw you an invite. Now all that’s left to do is wait for the best part of the game: your own version of the old TF2 “Meet the Team” videos.
