Thousands of People Are Playing the Mysterious Game ‘Deadlock’ Right Now

A new game from Valve appears to be on the horizon. Thousands of players have received invites to a game called Deadlock, a team-based shooter with multiplayer online battle arena (MOBA) elements. While Valve has yet to formally announce it, screenshots, gameplay, and even playtimes are already popping up online.

As of this writing, Valve hasn’t said one way or the other whether the game is theirs. It also doesn’t seem like any effort has been made to remove Deadlock from Steam, where more than 15,000 people were playing it on Tuesday, according to SteamDB. The all-time peak, reached on Monday, was 18,254 players.

It’s unclear how long Deadlock has been available to play, though one user on the game’s subreddit claims they’ve been playing for months already. Screenshots and gameplay footage on platforms like X and YouTube have been floating around for days.

Despite Valve’s silence (the company did not respond to WIRED’s request for comment), the mystery could prove a boon for the game. The developer behind critically acclaimed hits like Half-Life, Portal, and Team Fortress 2, Valve is notoriously secretive, often in ways that only help fuel hype for their titles. Players have been waiting on the followup to Half-Life 2 for nearly two decades now, with little to no information from the company.

According to The Verge, which published a hands-on preview of Deadlock, it’s a 6v6 shooter reminiscent of Blizzard’s Overwatch. “Your team of heroes attempts to dominate a map by slowly wearing down the opposing team and pushing them back,” Sean Hollister wrote in his preview. “But you’re also leading an army of NPC grunts down four different lanes to destroy the opposing team’s stationary defenses, a little like Dota 2 or other MOBA games.”

Hollister has since been banned from the game, presumably for his writeup. One game-launch popup he shared in his piece warns that the game is still in “early development,” and asks players to “not share anything about the game with anyone.” (Hollister says he was able to circumvent agreeing to this by hitting the Escape key.)

Online, some gamers got upset with The Verge for reporting on the title, which currently requires an invite to play, but it only seems to have increased interest in it—whatever it ends up being.

When, and will, Deadlock be available in a wider release? That remains a mystery.