Valve’s upcoming game combining MOBA and hero shooter elements Deadlock has been a source of curiosity due to its approach to playtesting.
Instead of announcing an alpha or beta, Valve simply sent out invites with the ability to invite more friends. This caused a strange situation in which a game that technically was still under wraps had a peak player count of 40,000 concurrent users at some point (according to the tracking site SteamDB).
While that’s not Black Myth: Wukong-level, it’s certainly not a number to sneeze at.
Instead of having testers sign a formal NDA, the developer also simply asked them not to share info about the game via mildly worded in-game popup, which some did not take particularly seriously, firmly propelling the cat out of the bag.
Now Steam has an official page open for the game, albeit it doesn’t really say much, and only shows the brief video below.
According to the page, “Deadlock is still in early development stages with lots of temporary art and experimental gameplay.” It also reiterates that “Access to Deadlock is currently limited to friend invites via our playtesters.”
We don’t even get official system requirements, containing Valve’s peculiar strategy of not sharing much more than what it has to about Deadlock. We do get the ability to wishlist the game, for those who want to.
It’ll certainly be interesting to see whether this strategy will pay off. It was certainly successful in building some buzz, at least assuming that building buzz figured prominently in Valve’s plans. For the moment, they aren’t sharing what these plans may be.
