Ever since the first leaks about Deadlock came out in May, Valve’s next game has been in a bit of a weird limbo: It has hundreds of gameplay videos in the wild, a public subreddit, and a peak player count of over 44,000 thanks to invites getting passed out like candy—including to Steam tracking website, SteamDB. But the studio itself refused to acknowledge the game’s existence until today. Deadlock has a Steam store page, and we’re finally allowed to talk about it and share clips, as if that stopped anyone before.
The Deadlock store page is extremely bare bones—you’re better off checking the game out on YouTube if you want any idea of what it’s about—but it’s something. There’s a teaser video, some extremely low-resolution key art, and a ton of reminders that Deadlock is a work in progress. “Deadlock is a multiplayer game in early development,” reads its topline description. “Early Development Build: Deadlock is still in early development stages with lots of temporary art and experimental gameplay.” You can’t even wishlist it yet.
Valve-focused account Gabe Follower shared a screenshot from the game’s preview Discord to X, “The Everything App.” In it, a Valve employee with the handle Yoshi (I don’t think they’re the real Yoshi guys) announces that the gag rule around the game has been lifted:
“We are lifting the rules for public conversation about Deadlock to allow for things like streaming, community websites, and discussions.
Nothing else is changing with our state of development. We are remaining invite-only and continue to be in an early development stage with lots of temporary art and experimental gameplay.”
While certainly a welcome change—we’ve been playing Deadlock ourselves, and we’d love to write about it on PC Gamer dot com—it doesn’t change much practically about Deadlock. It’s out there, people have been playing, watching, and talking about it, and if you’re lucky, a friend might toss you an invite. Now it’s just time to wait for the best part of the game: Its own version of the old TF2 “Meet the Team” videos.
