Valve’s hero shooter Deadlock has not been announced yet, but had 16,000 concurrent Steam players this weekend

Deadlock – a game that has not yet been officially announced – saw a peak of over 16,000 concurrent players this weekend.

At the time of writing, the game’s peak player count is 16,947 on Steam, with 4,714 people playing it at this very moment.

I just tried to install it myself via a small tab on SteamDB, but got the message: “An error occurred while starting this game: Game configuration not available.” I was then redirected back to the main Steam app page.

So what exactly is Deadlock? Well, it’s Valve’s hero shooter. But as we said, the maker of Half-Life hasn’t confirmed that it even exists, let alone that it’s playable in any form.

Leaked details about Deadlock surfaced earlier this year in the form of images posted on social media and a report by longtime Valve reporter Tyler McVicker. That report claimed that Deadlock was an Overwatch-style third-person shooter that was currently being tested behind closed doors.

McVicker described the project as one that includes MOBA and tower defense-inspired elements. It’s “like Valorant, Overwatch, Dota 2 and Team Fortress 2 had a baby,” the reporter said in May.

Later that same month, gameplay footage from the shooter (which is set in a sci-fi setting) was also leaked. This particular footage showed Deadlock’s training mode, some of its hero characters, and the existence of BioShock Infinite-style skyrails that players can hang onto and ride around on.

Just recently, in June, Valve filed the Deadlock trademark with the intention of covering a number of categories, including (but certainly not limited to) offering online video games and video game training.

Hopefully we’ll hear something more concrete and official about Deadlock soon. Eurogamer will keep you updated as soon as we know more.