Despite being unreleased to the public and only accessible via invites, Valve’s upcoming multiplayer shooter Deadlock is shaping up pretty well, with a player base that nearly rivals that of Blizzard’s hero shooter Overwatch.
According to Circana’s Mat Piscatella, Deadlock was the sixth most-played game on Steam in the United States in January 2026, whereas Blizzard’s shooter didn’t make it into the top ten. The Valve title also saw a resurgence of players recently, thanks to a new “Old Gods, New Blood” update, with player counts peaking at 125,290 on 16 February, according to SteamDB. In comparison, Overwatch saw a peak of 136,582 concurrent players during a similar timeframe.
Positioned as a team-based hero shooter MOBA mashup, Deadlock was soft-launched by Valve in 2024, but with a catch, as the game is open access and can only be played via invite codes sent by various Deadlock-centred content creators, which makes its achievements all the more impressive. The game centres on teams of fantasy heroes who hash it out with both players and AI bots in “lanes” in a similar style to Dota 2, just in a third-person shooter perspective, with the goal being to kill bots and gain cash to power up and eventually defeat the opposing team.
While the game has been out in the wild for quite some time now, player numbers have mostly fluctuated, that’s until the release of the “Old Gods, New Blood” update in late January, which added six new heroes to the game in addition to a major overhaul to the game experience and a new, faster game mode. This update effectively brought in a wave of new and returning players, a similar feat to what Overwatch achieved with its recent rebrand and “The Reign of Talon” expansion.
With a strong player base, even in its “unfinished” state, Deadlock proves just how much pull Valve has in the hero shooter space, especially considering it essentially created the genre with Team Fortress 2. While the game currently doesn’t have a proper release date, its positive early reception means that this is certainly one title to look out for down the line.
Kevin is a reformed PC Master Race gamer with a penchant for franchise “duds” like Darksiders III and Dead Space 3. He has made it his life-long mission to play every single major game release – lest his wallet dies trying.
