Deadlock Passes Team Fortress 2 Steam Peak With 262,145 Players

According to Steam player data tracked by SteamDB, Valve’s multiplayer online battle arena game Deadlock reached 262,145 concurrent players on Steam, surpassing the all-time concurrent player peak of Team Fortress 2, which stands at 253,997. ghacks.net reported that this record player surge coincided with the debut of Solomon, the last of six new heroes introduced to the game through its City Never Sleeps update. Deadlock remains technically in an invite-only test phase and has no public release date set by Valve.

Solomon and the City Never Sleeps Update

The player milestone follows the largest content patch for Deadlock to date. The City Never Sleeps update overhauls the entire game map, known as the Cursed Apple, by adding new neutral monsters and reworking areas to reflect an occult version of 1950s New York. Broadway, the center lane, now features a neon district centered around a miniature version of 1950s Times Square, while Greenwich has transformed into an occult take on Central Park complete with a university and an arboreal garden. Additionally, York converts former walker arenas into a stock exchange and factory grounds, and the spaces between lanes now house themed creeps and districts ranging from a theater district featuring creepy dolls to Chinatown with festival spirits and haunted cabbage pots.

Six new characters debuted consecutively alongside the update. The updated roster features Violet, an art student; Deadman Danny, a skeletal crash test dummy and weapons merchant; Nurse Harrow; the Rat King, equipped with more than 100 voice lines; Baba, a reimagining of the Baba Yaga legend mounted on a bird-legged park bench; and Solomon, an elderly chess enthusiast. Solomon fights using a chess board as a weapon, and user accounts note that each reload reproduces a distinct historical chess match configuration based on the quantity of bullets loaded onto the board. Valve also introduced dozens of new conversations and voice lines between existing characters.

Steam Player Records Compared

The new peak places Deadlock above Team Fortress 2’s all-time Steam concurrent player record of 253,997. However, the Team Fortress 2 figure carries a distinct caveat, as its Steam peak was set about three years ago and excludes players who accessed the game on the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 versions released through The Orange Box. Despite Deadlock remaining an invite-only test, Valve distributes invitations generously and users frequently share them within Discord communities, allowing interested players to gain access without difficulty by accepting an invite through Steam and installing the application.

Valve Timeline and Future Testing

Deadlock first leaked approximately two years ago, and activity within the test environment has steadily increased since that time. Valve has not announced when the game will exit its invite-only phase or whether the recent player peak will alter its broader release plans.