Earlier this year, a number of online reports claimed Valve was testing a new hero-shooter game that was reportedly called Deadlock. While Valve has yet to officially announce that it is working on any new game, it looks like it recruited a ton of people to test it out this past weekend.
The SteamDB.com site, which keeps track of all the games that are available on Valve"s Steam service, showed that the number of players for the unannounced Deadlock game went up to 16,946 concurrent gamers on Sunday. That would place the game well within the top 100 most played games on the Steam service if Valve showed Deadlock on its official Steam stats page.
Based on the SteamDB page for the game, it looks like Valve invited a lot more people to try out Deadlock online sometime in early August. However, the normally secretive Valve still has not made any official reveals or even teasers about the game. Hopefully, the fact that it did invite many more gamers to try it out means we will get some kind of announcement soon.
Based on the previous leaks that have popped up about Deadlock from social media posts, the game is a third-person hero shooter that also has tower defense elements. The game appears to be a mash-up of fantasy, steampunk, and science fiction themes. One leak report on X described one of the game"s maps as being "huge" and also supporting 6v6 player matches, along with the use of "floating rails" to move quickly on the maps.
Valve"s last game was Counter-Strike 2 which officially launched in September as a major revamp of its popular free-to-play shooter Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, and took over that game"s position as the most played game on Steam. Recent rumors claim Valve might actually be working on the long awaited Half-Life 3, but we have certainly heard those unconfirmed reports for years.