Deadlock hasn’t even been released yet and is already one of the most played Steam titles

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Although Deadlock is still in closed Early Access, it is already attracting hundreds of thousands of players

The new hero shooterDeadlockis curious for many reasons. Not only is itone of the worst kept secrets in the video game industry, it is also currently one of its biggest successes.

Valve’s latest game has alreadyrecorded well over 100,000 concurrent players on Steamand has even made it into the top 10 of the charts. That alone would be impressive enough, but it should not be forgotten that the majority of Steam users do not yet have access to the game due to the closed Early Access

A huge, exclusive circle

Even though Deadlock was only recently officially announced, the game has been played by numerous people since May. On May 25, it already had over 700 simultaneous players, and just under three months later it had hundreds of thousands

The six-digit mark was broken for the first time on August 29, when 106,000 players were online at the same time. Since then, a new record has been set every day. The current record dates back to September 2, 2024 and measures a whole171,000 players at once This even puts the long-running hit GTA 5 in the shade, which has just recorded 148,000 players

on Steam

But how can it be that Deadlock already has numerous players before it even became official? That’s because the mix of hero shooter and MOBA was made available to a small group of people beforehand, who ensured that it became increasingly well-known over a long period of time.

Since then, the only way to gain access is to be recommended by someone who is already allowed to play the game. Even though this increases the number of access options, the majority of Steam users still do not have access to Deadlock.

This makes the extremely high player numbers all the more impressive. The marketing strategy, with deliberately poor secrecy, artificial scarcity and the feeling of being part of an exclusive circle, seems to be working. Even if the circle is no longer so exclusive

The Steam page for Deadlock is very empty compared to other games. Valve has also called on players of the hero shooter not to tell other people about their own gaming experiences. All of this is presumably due to the fact that Deadlock is to be released as exclusively as possible. The game is still in Early Access, but a full release is expected as early as next year