Valve's new game racks up 22K concurrent players, without officially existing

Valve’s next game, which has yet to be officially announced, had over 16,000 concurrent players over the weekend. As of this writing, that number sits at 22,400 via SteamDB. The game is called Deadlock and we’ve known that Valve was working on it for a while, but now it seems as though we are in the midst of a soft launch of some kind.

Again, this game hasn’t been officially announced by the company, though something’s certainly going on. It’s likely that Valve has opened the game up to play tests to gauge how successful the title could be with a proper PR push behind it, as indicated by Eurogamer and others. These numbers are certainly impressive considering, you know, Deadlock has yet to be confirmed by the company.

So what is Deadlock? It’s a competitive MOBA shooter, billed as “the next Dota” by veteran Valve reporter Tyler McVicker. It’s reported to have been in development since 2018 and is a partnership with IceFrog, an unnamed creator who was originally behind the original Defense of the Ancients mod of Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos that started all of the Dota mania.

By all accounts, Deadlock is already in an advanced state of development, given the robust concurrent player count. McVicker describes it as looking “like Valorant, Overwatch, Dota 2 and Team Fortress 2 had a baby.”

After this article was originally published, an Engadget writer got an invite to the playtest, and can confirm many of the details leaked about the game. There are currently 20 heroes to choose from, and you can enter a sandbox mode to try each of them out. You're also able to browse ongoing matches to spectate and get a better feel for things before you're ready to dive in. The playtest build shows that the servers are open every day, for at least 12 hours each day.

While Valve hasn’t officially announced Deadlock, likely waiting for a surprise drop of some kind, the company did trademark the name back in June. So that’s something. With over 22,000 concurrents, it won’t be long before we all know a lot more about this game.

Update, August 13, 3:30PM ET: This story was updated after publishing with a brief explanation of what Valve's Deadlock playtest entails. The number of concurrent players in the headline and article was also updated to reflect the game's current player count. The original article stated there were over 16,000 players.