ⓘ Valve
Valve's "worst-kept secret" hit 262,145 concurrent players recently. Much of it is thanks to a chess grandmaster who turns your teammates into pawns.
Deadlock has officially overtaken Team Fortress 2's all-time concurrent player peak on Steam, and the game still isn't out yet. Valve's hero shooter-MOBA hybrid reached 262,145 simultaneous players on October 9, according to SteamDB, narrowly edging past TF2's record of 253,997 set in July 2023.
The milestone makes Deadlock the third-most-popular Valve game of all time by peak concurrent players, behind only Counter-Strike 2 and Dota 2. It also sits comfortably in the top 100 all-time Steam games at number 71, ranking above Apex Legends, Arc Raiders, and Rust at the time of writing.
Why the surge in Players?
The driving force behind the surge is Solomon, the third of six new heroes being rolled out through the City Never Sleeps update. Solomon is an ethereal chess grandmaster who floats around the map and hurls chess pieces at opponents instead of using a traditional weapon. His abilities let him place giant bishops that leave damaging diagonal squares, send rooks bouncing off walls, and promote allies into knights that can leap across the battlefield with full invulnerability during the move.
Check-Mate
What has captured the community's attention is his reload animation. Every time Solomon reloads, the pieces on his board rearrange into a layout based on his remaining ammo count, and each position is taken from an actual historical chess game. Players have identified references to the 1851 "Immortal Game" between Adolf Anderssen and Lionel Kieseritzky, as well as Deep Blue's 1996 victory over Garry Kasparov.
The player count jump is significant. Deadlock peaked at 228,086 concurrent players following the City Never Sleeps update in late September, meaning the October 9 record added more than 34,000 players to an already high benchmark. In 2025, the game never peaked above 70,000 concurrent players, but every month of 2026 has seen it skyrocket past that figure.
The milestone carries some caveats. TF2's record came in 2023, during a period when the game was dealing with botting issues and idle servers, so the comparison isn't perfectly clean. PC gaming was also a smaller phenomenon overall when TF2 was at its commercial peak, while Deadlock benefits from Steam's vastly larger user base today.
Valve has not officially announced Deadlock. The game remains invite-only, accessible only through a friend referral program, and has been in limited playtesting since August 2024. The community is voting on the next hero to join the roster, with four more still to come after Solomon, Baba the pigeon lady, and the Rat King.
For a game Valve has never formally revealed, beating the record of one of its most beloved shooters is a statement. The question now is whether Deadlock can maintain that momentum once it finally launches.
Rahim Amir Noorali - Tech Writer - 1163 articles published on Notebookcheck since 2025
I am a UAE-based tech writer who likes to build and benchmark PCs both professionally and as a hobby. I contribute to multiple tech publications, including TechRadar and Notebookcheck, as well as Game Rant, where I focus primarily on news, commerce, and buying guides. When I'm not scouring the internet for the latest in tech stories, you will find me playing a game of Civilization or DotA with friends and frenemies alike while dropping recommendations for Apple TV+'s Foundation to everyone I come across.