Deadlock (video game)

Deadlock is an upcoming team-based multiplayer third-person shooter MOBA game developed and published by Valve.
Since April 2024, Deadlock has been in early development playtesting. Players are encouraged to invite friends to test it via the online game service Steam, but were initially told not to share details about the game publicly.
Shortly after playtesting began, footage of Deadlock began to leak online. On August 12, 2024, a journalist was banned from the game after writing a preview for the technology site The Verge. Later that month, Valve lifted rules on public conversation for playtesters and published a Steam store page for Deadlock.
In September 2024, Deadlock reached a concurrent player count of over 170,000.
Deadlock is a 6v6 team-based third-person shooter and MOBA. In each match, the 12 players control unique "heroes" who begin split across three lanes in a large map. To win, one team has to push their "troopers" (NPCs who fight with the players) down the lanes and destroy the opposing team's "patron", a large supernatural entity located in the team's stronghold.
Players can gain "souls" and "ability points" by killing troopers, neutral NPCs called "denizens" and other players. These can then be used to upgrade their heroes' abilities and buy items in "curiosity shops" to make them stronger. The map can be navigated using ziplines on each lane as well as teleporters. The game has over 30 playable heroes, each with unique weapons, stats and abilities. Deadlock takes place in an alternative version of New York City, with references to the occult.
In October 2022, Valve registered a trademark for the name Neon Prime. Neon Prime was reportedly helmed by IceFrog (the lead designer of Dota), and would have been a MOBA with a sci-fi aesthetic. Further details were reported in 2023, indicating that it would have been a team-based "third-person 'MOBA-lite'", in which players need to defeat a boss enemy at the opposing team's base. A data miner claimed external playtesting for Neon Prime took place in 2023.
In May 2024, footage from a closed playtest of Deadlock began to leak online. Elements of the game matched the previous descriptions of Neon Prime and it was presumed to be a newer iteration of the same project. The playtest on Steam encourages participants to invite friends, but initially asked them not to "share anything about the game with anyone". Players also have access to a private Discord server to discuss the game and forums to read change logs, report bugs and provide feedback to the developers.
In August 2024, Valve lifted the rules on public conversation for playtesters and published a Steam store page for Deadlock. The page states that the game is currently in "early development stages" with "lots of temporary art and experimental gameplay". Access to the game continues to be invite-only.
In early development, Deadlock's map had a four lane layout. It was later reworked to have three lanes as part of a major update in February 2025.
On August 12, 2024, The Verge's Sean Hollister published a full preview. Hollister noted that since he had not signed nor verbally consented to any legally binding non-disclosure agreement, he was free to write about it, despite being shown a dialog box telling him not to share any information about the game with others. He was subsequently banned from the game's matchmaking. Some readers responded negatively to the article's publication. Aftermath's Riley MacLeod defended Hollister's reporting, saying that although ignoring Valve's request may have been impolite, Hollister was not legally nor professionally obligated to keep the details secret and had not violated journalistic ethics. Wired's Megan Farokhmanesh speculated that the secretive release strategy was a deliberate publicity stunt to tempt players to leak the game, building hype around it.
Ted Litchfield of PC Gamer wrote that it was "hard not to be excited" for a new Valve game and would play it on day one. Deadlock's aesthetic, mixing elements of fantasy with an early 1900s setting, has been compared to BioShock Infinite.