Deadlock - New Dota-like TPS by Valve

[Morenatsu.]

Oh man I wish Valve would just give up on multiplayer slop and give us more singleplayer slop that I also hate

I can understand disliking Valve's multiplayer offerings, but if you hate their singleplayer games too, i'm not sure what even motivated you to post in this thread.

Isn't this what everyone else is poasting?

 

[soutaiseiriron]

I am not sure you understand Valve's development philosophy. They're rich and in no hurry to push a new project out the door because it isn't "doing numbers" as a relatively feature-incomplete beta. They've never rushed anything and never will, because they don't have investors breathing down their necks.

Their development philosophy is just buying out a mod and modders who have actual creative ideas (because Valve has never had any since Half-Life 1.) Valve largely abandons games that aren't mega hits out of the gate. It happened to Artifact, it happened to Dota Underlords.

They've never rushed anything and never will

It's not hard to not rush anything, if you don't release anything.

 

[Assisted Living Godzilla]

Valve is such a weird company. As big as they are because of Steam now, they could easily be vastly bigger if they actually made games.

Valve is like a console manufacturer that barely produces games for their system.

 

[Inec0rn]

they make 30% of everything sold on steam, they have no need at all to pump out slop games and mindless sequels.

 

[Axel_am]

Valve sucks dicks.

 

[KVVRR]

Oh man I wish Valve would just give up on multiplayer slop and give us more singleplayer slop that I also hate

I can understand disliking Valve's multiplayer offerings, but if you hate their singleplayer games too, i'm not sure what even motivated you to post in this thread.

so many things happening around deadlock suggest that this is what may (hopefully) happen to it

they'll have a last ditch full launch (even though that's nonsense, it already launched and anyone that wants access has it, the "alpha" pretense was a bunch of bullshit trying to appeal to FOMO) and if that doesn't revive player numbers to >30k at any hour it's done for, valve won't seriously bother with a game that puts up the same numbers as TF2 without the bots that inflate those numbers. that's about 2 months away at this point, daily stats show TF2 does about 15k peak and 6k low, deadlock does 17k peak and 8k low.

I am not sure you understand Valve's development philosophy. They're rich and in no hurry to push a new project out the door because it isn't "doing numbers" as a relatively feature-incomplete beta. They've never rushed anything and never will, because they don't have investors breathing down their necks.

My personal hope is that they shut the alpha down sometime this summer, bring it back into deep dev and aim for a full 2026 release, with all the amenities we've come to expect from Dota 2 (and hopefully with none of the bloat, though I understand that is unlikely).

They do have a track record of just losing interest if a project is doing poorly, at least with their live service products that require constant care. Artifact, Underlords (which wasn't even doing that bad afaik), post-jungle inferno TF2...
There's absolutely no way this game releases in 2026 though. The core loop is there but balance wise is still kinda iffy, lots of new heroes need to be added still, and basically everything visual needs anywhere from 70% extra work to completion to a full on rework. Then there's introducing those pesky live service progression and cosmetic systems and the visual novel they wanted to do for the characters... Again under another company maybe this is doable. Not under Valve, they just aren't built for this.