Deadlock surpasses Team Fortress 2’s all-time concurrent player count peak as it adds a chess wizard

Valve’s latest MOBA might still technically be conducting an invite-only test, but it’s nevertheless one of the most popular games of its ilk. Yesterday, right as the game added the latest in its current batch of six new democratically released heroes, its concurrent player-count hit a new screaming high: 262,145 simultaneous players, according to SteamDB.

While that’s pretty impressive on its face, it’ll be especially noteworthy to long-time fans of Valve’s games that this surge of activity brought Deadlock past Team Fortress 2’s all-time concurrent player count peak of 253,997.

Though this doesn’t include the player numbers TF2 saw on the Xbox 360 and PS3 as part of The Orange Box, which I’m sure were positively through the roof, it’s still conceivably its genuine peak given that it was just three years ago. As for how TF2’s history of botting issues and idle servers might have affected that number, I can’t say.

It’s not a one-to-one—PC gaming was a smaller phenomenon overall when TF2 was at the height of its popularity, and its Quake-descended slapstick arguably appeals to a smaller crowd than a hero shooter-MOBA hybrid does today—but it’s an impressive showing for Deadlock given that the MOBA space is notoriously hard to break into.

I guess that’s the power of having a digital storefront so massive that you can afford to perform mad science experiments on a game for multiple years without making a single cent off of it directly. Not that things always go this way for Valve; remember Artifact?

Regardless, let’s all remember that it was specifically the latest hero, the chess mage Solomon, who got the game to this point. His gun is a chess board which players are reporting recreates a different historic game state every time you reload depending on how many bullets you have to load the field with (I’ll have to defer to the chess-heads in the crowd on the veracity of that). That sort of novelty certainly plays a role in the test’s momentum, which has only seemed to pick up since it first leaked two years ago.