SteamDB creator Pavel Djundik has clarified that the Deadlock entry on SteamDB did not originate through the token dumper system on SteamDB, but rather that “someone submitted a Steam key which the bot activated.” It is unclear what this implies about the entry’s origin or veracity.
First spotted by Valve-focused Twitter account wickedplayer494, it looks like a playtester for the unannounced Valve shooter Deadlock has made the game visible on SteamDB via the site’s token dumper feature, allowing anyone to see Deadlock’s player count, update history, and other details.
Valve has still neither confirmed nor denied the veracity of the numerous alleged Deadlock leaks we’ve seen over the past week. Having been through the NieR Automata Secret Church Saga, I’m not clearing them as 100% legit until the big V weighs in, but the sheer quality and quantity of videos and details from multiple sources all corroborating each other makes it hard to believe Deadlock is some kind of elaborate hoax.
And I really don’t think anyone could have faked this SteamDB entry. Wickedplayer494 posited that the page originated through SteamDB’s token dumper, which allows players of restricted games that the site’s tools cannot pull from—usually delisted, unreleased, or otherwise made private—to confer that access to the site. SteamDB creator Pavel Djundik has clarified that the entry did not come through the token dumper, but that “someone submitted a Steam key which the bot activated.”
The update history for one of Deadlock’s packages, “Project 8 – Staging for Beta Testing” dates all the way back to 2020, and the parent Deadlock package on SteamDB has 186 concurrent players at the time of writing. For this to be fake, someone would have had to take a private Steam app that’s been in existence in some form for four years, arrange for nearly 200 real or automated users to access it at the same time, and then dump its token.
Aside from concurrents, update history, and the Project 8 code name, we can see that there are currently both Windows and Linux builds of Deadlock—that makes sense with Valve’s Linux-based SteamOS, though I also wouldn’t have been surprised if the dev had just gone all in on Proton compatibility instead. One Deadlock depot looks like it contains tutorial information, with the file name “getting_started_movement_zipline” dovetailing with the Bioshock Infinite-style rail system we’ve seen in some of the leaks.
Another depot contains UI data that seems to include the names (or at least code names) of 25 playable characters—two more than featured in a YouTube video purporting to show all of the hero abilities in the game. “Inferno” corresponds to the flaming gunslinger we’ve seen elsewhere, “Infernus,” while Yamato strikes me as an easy fit for the samurai character from the leaks—I’ve included the full list of “hero_prefabs” names below, excluding the one labeled “default”:
- abrams
- archer
- astro
- bebop
- chrono
- digger
- forge
- geist
- gigawatt
- haze
- hornet
- inferno
- kelvin
- lash
- mirage
- nano
- prof_dynamo
- shiv
- tengu
- viscous
- warden
- wraith
- wrecker
- yamato
And that’s not even everything in Depot 1422456—I didn’t have time to comb through all 30 pages of filenames in time for publication. The audacity of this particular leak really gets me: the player count and a huge number of file names for a private playtest of an unannounced new Valve game, right there for our perusal.
Knowing Valve’s previous communication strategy, the company will likely not comment on any of this until it’s good and ready for a full Deadlock reveal, and that’s probably the right move. Honestly, the funniest possible outcomes would be for Valve to just never release Deadlock (the company has priors), or for it to have indeed been a hoax all along despite the evidence suggesting otherwise. Neither of those seem likely given the sheer extent of what we’ve seen, though.