Deadlock Hits New Peak Steam Player Count, Overtaking Team Fortress 2

Valve's unreleased hero shooter Deadlock reached a new all-time peak of 262,145 concurrent players on Steam, narrowly eclipsing Team Fortress 2's long-standing record of 253,997 set in 2023. For a game that still requires a friend invite just to get through the front door, pulling in a quarter-million people simultaneously is quite the party trick.

The surge follows the release of the game's "City Never Sleeps" update, which introduced Solomon—a chess-themed hero capable of turning sections of the battlefield into a literal grid. Solomon marks the midpoint of a six-hero rollout that also includes Baba and the Rat King, with Valve scheduling a community vote next Tuesday at 2 p.m. PDT to select the next addition.

The milestone places Deadlock fifth overall among Steam's most-played titles, trailing Aion 2 and Valve's own Counter-Strike 2 and Dota 2.

Despite the player surge, Valve emphasized that the game remains far from finished. "We felt that there was still a good amount of work we wanted to do on the core game itself before we moved onto more polish phases," the studio said, noting that progression systems, hideout customizations, and item overhauls are still actively being playtested.

The details

• Peak count: 262,145 concurrent players
• Status: Unreleased, invite-only testing phase
• Steam rank: #5 concurrent (#71 all-time)
• Developer: Valve

Whether those numbers hold once the invite-only mystique wears off remains to be seen, but for now, Valve's work-in-progress is already elbowing past its finished predecessors.