Valve has a new hero shooter in late development. It's a secret!
Except it's not, as over 20,000 invites have been sent out to play the game via Steam.
You're not supposed to talk about it!
Except none of those tens of thousands of players have been asked to sign or agree to any kind of legal NDA, and even though there's a pop-up at the beginning asking players not to share information about the game with anyone, the “secret” game even shows up on Steam's concurrent player lists. People with invites to the game can even send further invites to their friends, but they could be banned from using the online matchmaking system for doing so; or maybe for writing about it online? It's not entirely clear, probably because Valve is clearly making up the details of the strategy on the fly.
If Valve can make this approach to Deadlock a success, perhaps it will push us toward better ways of releasing online games.
The game is called Deadlock, and news about it broke headlines this week when The Verge published a feature on the game after writer Sean Hollister received an invite to play it on Steam.
As the Internet is wont to do, it has managed to turn this into an uproar, with overreactions ranging from those who simply “pick me” and cry and stomp their feet out of sheer slanderhe betrayalFrom Hollister daring to write (almost entirely positive) things about a game without the express permission of the people who, uh, invited him to play it and didn’t ask him to sign an NDA; to the other extreme, where people who have clearly been waiting to make noise for some time are talking about how this all proves, somehow, that Valve has too much power in the industry. Which it probably does, but running a not-very-closed beta for an unannounced game and then not doing much when someone inevitably writes an article about it isn’t exactly the expression of unfettered authoritarianism you might expect.
Amidst all this, I think there's something very important that's being overlooked: Valve is running a very interesting and worthwhile experiment. Two, in fact.
Deadlock itself sounds like a really interesting experiment that mixes and matches features from a wide range of game genres, including hero shooters and MOBAs. On their own, these are very overpopulated genres that audiences seem to be tired of to some degree; combining key aspects of them could create an experience that strikes an ideal balance between new and familiar for many players. It’s exciting to see how this plays out, and honestly, it’s been quite a while since anything in the hero shooter space really proved exciting, so it’s entirely possible that Valve is onto something right here.
The other experiment, however, is the one I find really interesting. The way Valve is approaching the launch is unusual, and while it's true that they're clearly making up certain aspects as they go along, the core strategy seems pretty well thought out and arguably much more suited to this type of game than the conventional game release model.
That conventional model is something we’ve been forced into for the past decade or so without much thought. Online games are announced long before release to build up huge pre-release hype; before the long-awaited release date, we get a couple of “open beta” weekends that are designed as marketing (or in some cases as rewards for pre-ordering the game) rather than an actual beta test; then, finally, we get to that big, monolithic release date, when the servers inevitably go down and the wave of anticipation crashes into a reality that hopefully won’t have too many bugs, disappointments, or missing features.
The classic approach of inviting pre-orders and reviews for a specific, do-or-die release date, and drawing mass public attention to version 1.0 in the process, is really asking for trouble.
This is an incredibly high-risk way to launch an online game, because literally everyone knows (or should know) that this type of game will need at least a few patches and updates before it reaches its full potential. Every online game needs that work, and it's work that can't be done effectively until the game is online and data from a real player base starts coming in. As a result, inviting pre-orders and reviews for a specific, life-or-death release date, and in the process drawing the public's attention to version 1.0, is really asking for trouble.
Some games overcome these problems just fine; others don't, either because their first version was too rough for the public to see the game's potential or, very often, because the publisher wasn't prepared to give the game the post-release support it needed for the work required to get it up and running.
What Valve is doing with Deadlock is instead the gaming equivalent of a “soft launch” for a new product. One reason all the fanfare about NDAs following The Verge’s article is misplaced is that Valve hasn’t gone to much effort to keep Deadlock a secret. It’s not that Valve doesn’t know how NDAs work; if they really wanted to keep Deadlock a secret, I’m pretty sure they know how to do it far more effectively than we’ve seen here.
Instead, their approach has been to simply maintain some control over open discussion about the game while expanding the list of people who can access it to tens of thousands of players. It’s not quite closed, not quite open, and it’s not really a beta, so neither the “open beta” nor “closed beta” labels fit perfectly, though the concepts are similar. It’s essentially a strategy to gradually increase player count, in the hopes of avoiding massive server issues and giving the team a chance to work on fixes and updates to the game while it’s in this twilight state of having enough players to get useful data, without it actually being a “released” game yet.
If Deadlock can't keep people interested and they go back to Fortnite and so on, then all the clever launch strategy in the world won't save it.
That's the technical side, but there's also a marketing aspect. Leaking information is inevitable, and as that leak gradually becomes a flood, the mere fact that it's “hidden” information about a “secret” game should go a long way toward making people want to access it. It's not so much about building anticipation not for a “launch” because the game is already out and tons of people are already playing it, but for the moments when access will be opened up to wider groups of players.
Those with enough gray hair can probably remember how desirable a Facebook account was when eligibility was just gradually opening up to new groups — granted, it’s hard to remember Facebook being desirable now that it’s almost entirely a site for older people getting scammed by AI-generated images — but the manufactured scarcity strategy still works as well as ever.
Ultimately, of course, the game still has to be good. If Deadlock can’t keep people interested and they turn to Fortnite and Overwatch and the like, then all the clever launch strategy in the world won’t save it. It also remains to be seen how the game’s monetisation will work – one aspect of this strategy that seems potentially clever is that the game doesn’t have any of that active yet. This should move the crucial initial debate about the game towards a debate about the game itself rather than its business model, but it also risks being surprised when transactions are actually introduced later on.
Overall, this approach seems to give the game a fighting chance that others in this field haven’t had to the same extent. It’s instructive to consider the gap between the growing hype around Deadlock and the distinctly chilly reception Concord seems to be receiving upon its release next week. Part of that is simply down to the game itself, as Deadlock is a significantly major innovation in the hero shooter genre, but we can also reasonably wonder how different things might have been for Concord had it launched this way and was approaching a much less pressured “general release” date after months of growth and improvement with tens of thousands of players on the game.
That seems to be what Valve is going for, at least in broad strokes. Releasing a big, flashy trailer with a release date thrown in at the end is the default announcement strategy for pretty much any kind of game these days (and I know it's going to be hard for marketers to get rid of those pre-rendered trailers), but if Valve can make this approach a success for Deadlock, perhaps it will push us toward better ways of handling launches and managing the risk of online games.