Deadlock almost broke into Steam’s 100 most-played games despite not being announced yet

Deadlock, Valve’s upcoming hybrid between hero-shooter and MOBA, almost got into the 100 most-played games on Steam over the past weekend, peaking at 16,947 concurrent players, according to SteamDB – a very strong player count considering that Valve hasn’t even publicly acknowledged the game’s existence yet. With that CCU peak it ranked at #107 on the list of most-played games on the platform on Sunday. Screenshots from the ongoing Deadlock playtest emerged earlier this year, confirming rumors that had been circulating around the project for a while. Previously known as Neon Prime and Citadel, Deadlock is supposedly the title Dota 2 creator Icefrog has been working on. Valve seems to be steadily expanding the pool of testers for the game, as it apparently allows players to invite users on their Steam friend list to participate. This is not the first time the developer and publisher essentially soft-launched a game like this – Dota 2 being the most famous example. It was available as a “closed beta” for the l