Deadlock Smashes Team Fortress 2's All-Time Player Peak

Did you ever think you'd see the day a Valve MOBA would outdo Team Fortress 2's all-time concurrent player record? Well, that day is here. Deadlock, Valve's invite-only hero shooter-MOBA hybrid, just hit a new peak of 262,145 simultaneous players, according to SteamDB. That's a lot of people crammed into a game that's still technically in testing.

What makes this milestone extra sweet for Valve fans is that it pushes Deadlock past Team Fortress 2's all-time concurrent peak of 253,997. Now, that TF2 number doesn't include the player counts from the Xbox 360 and PS3 versions that came with The Orange Box, which were surely massive. But it's still a genuine peak for the PC version, and it happened just three years ago. Of course, TF2's history of botting issues and idle servers might have inflated that number a bit—we can't say for sure. Either way, Deadlock's achievement is nothing to sneeze at.

Context matters, though. PC gaming was a smaller phenomenon when TF2 was at its height, and its Quake-descended slapstick arguably appeals to a narrower crowd than today's hero shooter-MOBA hybrids. Plus, the MOBA space is notoriously hard to break into. So for Deadlock to hit this milestone while still invite-only is pretty impressive. It's the kind of thing you can only pull off when you own a digital storefront so massive you can afford to perform mad science experiments on a game for years without making a single cent directly from it. Not every Valve experiment pans out—remember Artifact?—but this one is clearly resonating.

And what's the secret sauce this time? The latest hero, a chess mage named Solomon. His gun is a chess board, and players are reporting that it recreates a different historic game state every time you reload, depending on how many bullets you have left. We'll have to defer to the chess-heads on whether that's true, but it's exactly the kind of novelty that keeps the momentum going. Since Deadlock first leaked two years ago, its popularity has only seemed to pick up.

So what does this mean for you? If you're lucky enough to be in the invite-only test, you're part of a game that's already making history. If not, you might want to keep an eye on how this one develops—it's clearly not slowing down. The fact that a game still in testing can surpass a beloved classic like TF2 says a lot about both Valve's pedigree and the appetite for something new in the MOBA space.

Will you be trying to get into Deadlock, or are you sticking with TF2? Let us know in the comments!