Deadlock: new life for a legend still in the making

How Valve almost lost Deadlock

The game's history is longer than it might seem. Dataminer accounts place the start of development in 2018. The codename Citadel appeared in Dota 2 code in 2019, and Valve registered the Neon Prime trademark in 2022. Playtest footage leaked in May 2024; Valve officially opened the Steam page in August.

The start was spectacular. On 2 September 2024, SteamDB recorded 171,490 simultaneous players, while that month's average was around 93,000. All of this happened with access restricted to invitations from existing players.

Then came the decline. In December 2024, numbers fell as Marvel Rivals launched; according to its developer, the rival quickly attracted more than 20 million players. The timing does not prove that the competitor caused Deadlock's losses. By spring 2025, though, the drop was substantial.

Valve did not abandon the project. Instead, it reworked the foundations. In February 2025, the map lost its fourth lane and became a three-lane battlefield. The shop and items were overhauled in May. August brought a new visual style and six more heroes.

Voting as a reason to return

Valve's most interesting idea is not simply adding heroes, but deciding how to release them. Since August 2025, new characters have arrived in groups of six, with players voting on the order of release.

Each wave coincided with a significant jump:

• August 2025: after the six-hero wave, the monthly peak increased almost fourfold to roughly 60,000.
• January 2026, Old Gods, New Blood: six more heroes brought the roster to 38, alongside 4v4 Street Brawl and reworked Patrons. February's peak reached around 125,000.
• September 2026, City Never Sleeps: another six heroes, a substantially rebuilt map and a run of new records.

Comparing the rosters described in the source material, the game grew from 20 heroes to 44 in two years. A Notebookcheck article published on 16 October also noted that monthly peaks in 2025 remained below 70,000, while the elapsed months of 2026 had exceeded that threshold. That describes observed months, not a forecast for the rest of the year.

City Never Sleeps refined the voting system. Players vote before the match, and the winning team's votes count double. The first win of the day also grants double votes. Voting now takes place in the new pre-game lobby.

What City Never Sleeps brought

The update launched on 29 September 2026. Contemporary reporting recorded 228,086 concurrent players roughly half an hour after release, surpassing the game's two-year-old high.

A new map

The setting is still an alternate early-20th-century New York, the Cursed Apple. But the city is darker and more Gothic, and the lanes have names drawn from the real city:

• Broadway, the central lane: from Uptown and Times Square to Downtown;
• Greenwich: through Umbria University, Central Park and the Brownstones;
• York: the Stock Exchange, Seaport Dock and the old Fairfax factories.

The spaces between the lanes are divided into four districts: Theatre, Chinatown, Haunted Lot and Plaza. There is a Sunken Plaza below the main square and a Bell Tower on the map.

Haunts replace the old neutrals

Neutral creatures are now called Haunts, with different inhabitants reflecting their districts. Chinatown features Crabbage Pots and Festival Spirit; Shrooms populate Haunted Lot, while Specimen lurk around the city centre.

The update also introduced new objects:

• Steam Vents provide invisibility and a small amount of regeneration while a hero stands on them.
• Tough Crates require a heavy melee hit to open.
• Healing Snacks are healing pickups hidden around the map.
• The Broker was a temporary merchant for the opening event. Valve's update page said he would be around for only a few days, until the first new hero arrived. This describes the September launch event, not a promise that he appears in every current match.

Six heroes on a schedule

The heroes did not arrive all at once. Valve announced two releases a week, on Tuesdays and Fridays at 2pm PDT (UTC−7), starting on 2 October. In the UAE that was 1am the following day, Gulf Standard Time (UTC+4). The table uses the original PDT release dates consistently rather than mixing time zones.

As of 21 October, all six heroes have been released. Valve confirmed the end of the wave when Nurse Harrow arrived.

Violet captures the direction of Deadlock's character design. In Valve's official introduction, Living Ink empowers her bullets and brings her drawings to life; Flow State helps her move towards an enemy or escape, while Still Life uses a portrait to stun its subject. Exact numerical ability parameters can change with patches. This is no longer simply a shooter with special abilities: shooting and painting become parts of the same combat language.

There were changes under the bonnet too: an updated Source 2 version, a reworked shop interface and event feed, and anti-cheat improvements. Valve says pre-match conversations increased from just over 700 to 1,500, with more than 10,000 non-ping voice lines added.

What the Team Fortress 2 record actually means

The daily figures help explain the spikes. No hero launched on 5 October, when the daily peak was around 156,000. Baba arrived the next day and the figure rose to 236,730. On 9 October, Solomon's release day, it reached 262,145.

That surpassed Team Fortress 2's record of 253,997, recorded on 13 July 2023, by 8,148 players.

There are two reasons not to overstate the comparison:

• A count of running game clients does not distinguish active play from idling or automated accounts. The total alone cannot establish how much bots contributed to that particular TF2 record.
• These are peak concurrent-player figures, not total audiences, and Steam's overall user base has changed since TF2's heyday.

The defensible statement is that Deadlock exceeded TF2's recorded SteamDB peak. The numbers alone do not establish that Deadlock is more popular than TF2.

There is another caveat. Lower counts between releases suggest that part of the resurgence was tied to the schedule: a new character every three or four days brought people back to look. That is an editorial interpretation of the daily figures, not a controlled causal measurement. The rollout ended on 20 October PDT. The following weeks will show how well the game retains those players.

What Deadlock still lacks

Records do not mean launch is close, and Valve is explicit about that. In its update announcement, the team described multiplayer development as difficult and risky, and explained that early player access helps it understand what works before the game is finished.

Valve identified several unfinished areas:

• Midboss, Guardians and Walkers: map objectives that still need work.
• Progression and hero and Hideout customisation: systems the team wants to be able to change substantially in response to feedback before full release.
• Item redesigns and alternative modes: ideas under consideration, some of which may never ship.
• New models for older heroes: work intended for future updates rather than something already complete.

The Steam page reflects this uncertainty: early development, temporary art, a release date still to be announced, and system requirements to be determined apart from a 64-bit processor and operating system. The original article cites Insider Gaming's expectation that an open test would not arrive before 2027. That is an outlet's assessment, not a date announced by Valve.

How to access Deadlock now

1. Find someone who already plays Deadlock. If none of your friends do, player communities on Reddit or Discord may help you find an existing participant.
2. Ask them to send an invitation through the game, then accept it in Steam.
3. Wait for access to appear in your library; it is not necessarily immediate.
4. Download the game and start with the tutorial. The original material gives approximately 30GB as a guide, but installation size changes with updates. Check Steam's current free-space requirement before installing.

The official Steam page says access is via invitations from existing playtesters. Avoid paid “guaranteed invitations”: they are not an official purchase route. Nothing here promises different access rules, a local server location or a particular connection quality for UAE accounts.

If you are already playing and frame rates have dropped after an update, our guides to improving game FPS and monitoring FPS and temperatures may help. To see how Deadlock fits alongside other shooters, explore our selection of PC shooters.

A legend that has not launched yet

Valve has again done something that might be labelled failure at another studio: kept a game closed for two years without a launch date or final requirements. In that time, Deadlock has already seen an initial surge, a deep slump and a return to concurrent-player numbers above TF2's recorded high.

The important question is no longer simply whether Deadlock will launch, but whether it can hold people's attention without a new hero every few days. The next wave of content, and the first weeks after Nurse Harrow's arrival, will tell us more than any single record.