New Valve Game Officially Beats Team Fortress 2

Valve’s Deadlock has surpassed Team Fortress 2‘s all-time concurrent-player peak on Steam. The achievement is particularly impressive considering Deadlock is still awaiting its full-fledged release and remains in an invite-only phase.

Deadlock has been playable in a limited capacity for more than two years, with its playtest originally launching in August 2024. Designed as a hybrid of a third-person shooter and MOBA, the game has steadily expanded since then with new content and a wide range of balancing changes. As such, even though Valve has yet to officially announce Deadlock, its worst-kept secret has continued to attract players and reach increasingly greater popularity heights.

Deadlock Has Surpassed Team Fortress 2’s Steam Player Record

In the latest testament to this trend, Deadlock reached a new all-time concurrent player peak of 262,145 on October 9, according to data scraped by SteamDB. That was enough to push it past Team Fortress 2‘s record of 253,997 concurrent Steam players. The milestone makes Deadlock the third-most-popular Valve game of all time by peak concurrent players on Steam, behind only Counter-Strike 2 and Dota 2.

Valve’s Most Popular Games of All Time by Concurrent Steam Player Count

#	Game	Player Peak Count	Player Peak Date
1	Counter-Strike 2	1,862,531	Apr 12, 2025
2	Dota 2	1,295,114	Mar 6, 2016
3	Deadlock	262,145	Oct 9, 2026
4	Team Fortress 2	253,997	Jul 13, 2023
5	Left 4 Dead 2	162,399	Dec 26, 2013

The Team Fortress 2 record that Deadlock surpassed is considerably newer than the 2007 shooter’s age might suggest. The long-running game reached its 253,997-player peak in July 2023, with the milestone being a direct result of its Summer 2023 update that introduces new cosmetics, taunts, and 14 community maps, among other additions.

The new record also represents a sizable jump over Deadlock‘s previous highs. The game peaked at 171,490 concurrent players during its initial 2024 surge before later returning to six-figure player counts as Valve continued expanding its still-growing playtest. More recently, it reached 228,086 concurrent users following the arrival of the City Never Sleeps update in late September 2026. In other words, the October 9 record added more than 34,000 players to an already high (and recently improved) benchmark.

The City Never Sleeps update has provided Deadlock with plenty of new material to draw players back. In addition to the kind of content drops that have become commonplace across major Deadlock updates, the release kicked off a staggered rollout of six new heroes. Valve is adding two heroes per week while letting players vote on which pair arrives next. So far, Rat King became playable on October 2, Baba followed on October 6, and the chess-themed wizard Solomon joined the roster on October 9. Deadlock therefore set its new Steam player record on the same day the third of those six heroes arrived. Although that timing makes Solomon’s debut a convenient marker for the milestone, the available player-count data does not establish that any single hero or update feature drove the surge on its own. Instead, Deadlock‘s player count rose gradually over the two weeks leading up to the October 9 peak.