With more information about Valve’s yet-to-be-announced game appearing on SteamDB, Gabe Newell’s company may soon be on the verge of officially confirming that Deadlock is in the works…

Pavel Djundik, the creator of SteamDB, claims that the Deadlock listing on the site didn’t appear through the site’s token system, but by someone entering a Steam code to activate the bot. On Twitter, @wickedplayer494 wrote that a game tester made Deadlock public on SteamDB by dumping the token so that the player count, update history, and other details could be viewed.

Someone has donated through @SteamDB‘s dumper a Steam token for Valve’s latest skunkworks project Deadlock, which allows it to provide better surveillance on development, as well as /charts/ data every 10 minutes on the :10s. Right now, ~130 are playing. https://t.co/rhjRTJCqd2 pic.twitter.com/TLtM8Z68rY

— wickedplayer494 (@wickedplayer494) May 25, 2024

One of Deadlock’s Steam data packs, Project 8 – Staging for Beta Testing, was already on Valve’s system in 2020, so this may lend credence to the rumor that the game previously had sci-fi elements and that a concept change is keeping the studio from confirming the game’s existence. According to SteamDB, Deadlock will be available for Windows and Linux. The latter makes sense since Steam Deck’s operating system, SteamOS, is Linux-based, so the game can run natively on the device.

One of the game’s packages may contain the tutorial information (getting_started_movement_zipline), which reinforces hanging on the cable and moving between lanes. Another depot may contain interface information, and here you can see the name or codename of 25 characters: abrams, archer, astro, bebop, chrono, digger, forge, geist, gigawatt, haze, hornet, inferno, kelvin, lash, mirage, nano, pocket, prof_dynamo, shiv, tengu, viscous, warden, wraith, wrecker, yamato.

Those are pretty specific details about Valve’s game. Deadlocks can no longer be said not to exist, because they can no longer be part of a giant hoax. Knowing Valve’s mentality, the studio won’t say anything about Deadlock until the team is ready for a full reveal. The other, slightly funnier option would be if the game never gets released…

Source: PCGamer, SteamDB