Valve’s Deadlock is pulling in quite a few players for a game that’s still unannounced

Valve’s got something brewing, it seems. The Half-Life and Portal studio appears to be working on something, which may or may not be Half-Life 3 (finally). But before that, there’s Deadlock, an unannounced Overwatch-style game which, despite no official word from Valve as to whether it’s even real or not, is pulling some pretty hefty player count numbers on Steam.

As noted by the third-party tracking site SteamDB, the elusive Deadlock recently registered a peak concurrent player count on Steam. Over the weekend, Deadlock hit a high of 16,947 players. At the time of writing, there are just under 11,000 people in a game.

It’s worth reminding you that this is for a game that has not even been announced yet, yet it’s drawing thousands to it already. According to a few comments under SteamDB’s post on X, some perhaps notable people — streamers and the like — appear to have gotten invites to playtest the game.

So does Deadlock exist, then?

As far as we can tell, Valve is working on a new game, currently titled Deadlock. It’s being described as a hero shooter that supposedly has elements of Overwatch 2 in there. A Reddit user posted a video (which has since been removed) a few months ago that allegedly showed footage from an early build of the project.

It’s also worth noting that while the SteamDB page for the unannounced game doesn’t specify who the developer is, it does list Source 2 as the technology being used to create it, which is the engine Valve uses for games such as Half-Life: Alyx and Counter-Strike 2. Also, this is not to be confused with the VR game Deadlock, which was released in 2016 and does not appear to be related in any way.

In short: if the game is real – which it seems to be based on what others have been saying – then thousands of people are already playing it, almost certainly as part of some closed test. At this point, Valve really needs to come forward and confirm whether all this is true or not. I mean, it kind of feels like Deadlock is happening, but without official word from the studio, we can only speculate, even if the evidence is starting to pile up.