Datamining has revealed that Deadlock’s Steam page is up.
As shared on the GamingLeaksandRumors subreddit by user m1n3c7afty, SteamDB recorded the entry for Deadlock on Steam. If you look at the SteamDB entry, Valve is also actively updating the game as well. The person running SteamDB has also verified that the entry is legitimate.
It’s very interesting that Valve has just allowed this information to go public, when they have yet to officially announce it. The SteamDB record also logs that it had a maximum concurrent player count of 996 players in the last 24 hours. As of this writing, it has 260 players.
We want to make this very clear; Valve could have kept this information hidden, and they decided to just let it out. As we had shared in prior reporting, Valve did not hold any of their beta or alpha players down to an NDA, and this game could have leaked much earlier.
It may have seemed that those players and fans were being ungrateful to Valve, given how much footage of the game from the current beta build has leaked over the weekend. But this may actually indicate that Valve is fine with that.
This could be because Valve has gotten far enough in the game that they are sure they will be able to ship it, and revealing this information will not compromise its release. Other game companies are certainly more careful as they want to control how their games are announced, but Valve is happy to see how the fans will share their projects for them.
There may also be an ulterior motive here, that fans, and even the beta leakers, may not have realized. Valve knows, of course, that this game idea is a bit far out, and they may be looking for what fans are saying, to calibrate how they will do marketing and promotion for Deadlock, or if necessary, even make changes to the game itself.
In any case, we have seen that Valve isn’t locking down on any of the leaked footage. In spite of that, we do feel the need to point out that these leaks are of a game in progress, and may not resemble Deadlock when it finally releases. It may be counterproductive to allow fans to set expectations for this game when Valve decides to change it after. But that’s the sort of thing that we’ll just have to see play out.
In any case, it’s hard to imagine that Valve would have let this information go public if they weren’t planning to publish the game now. If it isn’t about to get the full official release, they may be moving forward with Early Access, which Valve enabled on their own platform for all the developers there, of course.
