Valve still isn't talking about its much leaked hero shooter - despite the fact almost 17,000 people played it over the weekend

Valve needs to start talking about its frequently rumoured and leaked hero shooter Deadlock, because 17,000 people can't just be playing nothing.

We've known about Valve's next game, supposedly titled Deadlock, for quite a while now, with a trademark even having been filed back in June for the game's name by the developer. But even all these months on, with leaked footage having been shared online proving it exists at least in some capacity, Valve just hasn't even let out a whisper of its existence publicly. And yet, as you can see on the game's SteamDB page, it managed to attract a concurrent player count peak of almost 17,000, a pretty impressive figure for a game that doesn't technically exist just yet. At the time of writing there's 4664 people in-game, so the test is clearly still ongoing too.

Looking at Deadlock's monthly players breakdown, you can see that it had players as far back as May, with more tests happening in June and July too, but the highest player count out of the three only amassed to a little under 3000. That certainly suggests that Valve is doing a much larger scale currently, but considering just how many players there are it's a bit wild the dev hasn't just properly announced it. Noted Valve content creator and reporter Gabe Follower says that more than 200,000 players have access to the game, so it's not like it's easy to hide.

Some footage of the game has been shared online, though I can only imagine that's breaking the terms of agreement, so don't expect it to hang around too long. From the looks of it, Deadlock should be an Overwatch style game mixing steampunk and fantasy. Presumably it will release within the next year, given the testing, but you'll just have to wait for that official announcement first.