It’s been an open secret for quite some time that Valve is working on a game called Deadlock, but the studio only just officially announced its new game today. That said, it wasn’t much of an announcement, as the game’s existence was quietly confirmed by a mostly empty Steam page, which says that Deadlock is “a multiplayer game in early development.”
“Deadlock is in early development with lots of temporary art and experimental gameplay,” reads a notice on the Steam page for the game, which went live on Friday. “Access is currently limited to friend invite via our playtesters.”
Other than that, all Valve gave us was a short video featuring a beastly police officer smoking a cigarette on a street corner. The cartoonish art style looks rather similar to two of Valve’s other multiplayer games: Team Fortress 2 and DOTA 2.
While Valve has yet to publicly discuss the game, tens of thousands of players have access. In fact, SteamDB shows that nearly 30,000 players are in the game at the time of writing. You can even watch people play the game on Twitch right now.
Given that Valve banned The Verge’s Sean Hollister for writing about his time playing the game, I won’t share any more details here, but needless to say, they aren’t hard to find. Presumably, Valve is readying for a more public test in the near future.