Deadlock cracks 300,000 concurrent players following new hero release even

Week after week, Deadlock seems to be hell-bent on crashing its own records. It’s now cracked the 300,000 concurrent player mark, an incredible milestone for an invite-only closed-alpha game, which, by the way, is now more popular than Team Fortress 2 ever was.

With the release of Violet, Deadlock‘s newest and probably most boring character, the game has officially crossed 300,000 concurrent players on Steam, reaching 303,347 players according to SteamDB. The game remains gated off, meaning you need to be invited by someone on your friends list who already has access. It’s not readily available on the Store, nor can it even be searched on Steam at the moment, but none of this is stopping it from being the fourth most-played game on the platform.

Yep, you’ve read that right: Deadlock, which isn’t even out yet, is in the top four games on Steam by concurrent players, clocking in higher than AION 2, WARDOGS, and Arc Raiders, though the latter two are maybe unfair comparisons since you have to fork over 40 bucks to play them.

Last week, the game even outpaced Team Fortress 2, which probably walked so Deadlock could run. The latter has all those iconic hero shooter elements popularized by TF2 and later Overwatch, though it does remain rather different since it’s a MOBA at heart, placing it closer to Dota 2 than TF2.

This increased attention to the game is the result of its most recent update, City Never Sleeps, which brought a plethora of overhauls and improvements to the game’s map and systems alongside six new heroes, with two releasing each week. Violet came out last night, boasting a powerful and magical brush that she can paint the map with, creating platforms to traverse or circumventing them to strike at enemies.

The last hero remaining to be added is Nurse Harrow, set to release on Tuesday evening, so expect another new Deadlock peak soon.

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