Valve's not-so-secret game Deadlock is a bold experiment in soft-launching | Opinion

Valve has a new hero shooter in the late stages of development. It's a secret!

Except it's not really, since over 20,000 invites to play the game have been sent out over Steam.

You're not meant 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 while there's a pop-up at the start which asks players not to share information about the game with anyone, the "secret” game even appears on Steam's own concurrent player charts. People with invites to the game can even send further invites to friends, but they might get banned from online matchmaking for doing so; or maybe for writing about it online? It's not really clear – probably because Valve is clearly making up the details of strategy as they go along.

If Valve can make a success out of this approach for Deadlock, perhaps it'll push us towards better ways of launching online games

The game is Deadlock, and information about it broke containment this week when The Verge published a feature on the game after writer Sean Hollister received an invitation to it on Steam.

As the Internet generally does, it's managed to turn this into a brouhaha, with over the top reactions ranging from pick-me types on one side weeping and stamping their feet over the sheer calumny, the treachery, of 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 grind this axe for some time are holding forth about how this all proves, somehow, that Valve has too much power in the industry. Which they probably do, but running a not-very-closed beta for an unannounced game and then not doing very much when someone inevitably writes an article about it isn't quite the expression of limitless authoritarianism you might expect.

In the midst of all this, I think there's something quite important being missed, which is that Valve is performing a very interesting and worthwhile experiment here. Two, in fact.

Deadlock itself sounds like a really interesting experiment in mixing and matching features from across a range of game genres, including hero shooters and MOBAs. By themselves, those are very overpopulated genres that audiences seem to be tiring of to some extent; combining key aspects of them could create an experience that strikes an ideal balance of fresh and familiar for a lot of players. It's exciting to see how that plays out, and honestly it's been a fair while since anything in the hero shooter space actually felt exciting, so Valve is quite possibly on to something here.

The other experiment, though, is the really interesting one to me. The way Valve is going about the launch is unusual, and while yes, they're clearly making up certain aspects of it as they go along, the core strategy seems pretty well considered – and arguably much better suited to this kind of game than the conventional model for launching games.

That conventional model is something we've ended up being lumbered with for the past decade or so without much thought being put into it. Online games are announced well before their launch in order to build up a ton of pre-release hype; prior to the much-trailed launch date we get a couple of "open beta" weekends that are designed as marketing (or in some cases as pre-order rewards) rather than as real beta testing; then finally, we hit that big, monolithic launch date, when the servers inevitably fall over and the wave of hype crashes against 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 launch date, and turning massive spotlights of public attention onto 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 kind of game is going to take at least a few patches and updates before really hitting its stride. Every online game needs that work, and it's work that can't really be done effectively until the game is live and data from a real player-base starts to flow in. Consequently, inviting pre-orders and reviews for a specific, do-or-die launch date, and turning massive spotlights of public attention onto Version 1.0 in the process, is really asking for trouble.

Some games weather that trouble very well; others don't, either because their first version was just too rough for the public to see the potential in the game, or – very often – because the publisher wasn't prepared to give the game the post-launch backing it needed for the work required to get it up to scratch.

What Valve is doing with Deadlock is, instead, the video game equivalent of a "soft launch" for a new product. One reason why all the arm-waving about NDAs in the wake of The Verge's article is misplaced is that Valve hasn't actually tried very hard to keep Deadlock under wraps. It's not like 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 that much more effectively than we've seen here.

Instead, their focus has been on simply keeping a bit of a lid on open discussion of the game while building out the list of people who can access it to tens of thousands of players. It's not quite closed, not quite open, and not really a beta, so neither the "open beta” nor "closed beta” labels fit neatly, although the concepts are similar. It's essentially a strategy to ramp up player numbers gradually – hopefully avoiding massive server problems and giving the team an opportunity to work on fixes and updates to the game while it's in this twilight state of having enough players to get useful data from, while still not actually being a "launched" game.

If Deadlock can't hold people's interest and they drift back to Fortnite and so on, then all the smart rollout strategy in the world won't save it

That's the technical side – but there's also a marketing side to this. Information leakage is inevitable, and as that trickle gradually builds to a flood, the very fact that this is "hidden” information about a "secret” game should be doing a great job of making people want access to it. It's not so much building hype not towards a "launch", because the game is live and tons of people are playing it already, but towards the points when access will be opened up to wider groups of players.

Those with enough grey hairs can probably recall how desirable a Facebook account was back when eligibility was only being opened up gradually to new groups – granted, it's tough to recall Facebook being desirable now that it's almost entirely a site for elderly people getting conned by AI-generated images, but the strategy of manufactured scarcity still works just as well as it ever did.

Ultimately, of course, the game still has to be good. If Deadlock can't hold people's interest and they drift back to Fortnite and Overwatch and so on, then all the smart rollout 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 feels potentially smart is that the game doesn't have any of that stuff active as yet. This should push crucial early discussion of the game towards discussion of the actual game rather than its business model, but it does also risk sticker shock when transactions are actually introduced later.

Overall, this approach feels like it's giving 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 building hype around Deadlock and the distinctly chilly reception Concord seems to be wading into with its launch next week. Some of that is just down to the game itself, with Deadlock being a significantly greater innovation on the hero shooter genre – but we can also reasonably ask how different things could have been for Concord if it had been soft-launched in this way, and was approaching a much less pressured "wide launch” date off the back of months of growth and improvement with tens of thousands of players in the game.

That seems to be what Valve is aiming for, at least in broad strokes. Dropping a big, flashy trailer with a launch date flashing up at the end is the default announcement strategy for almost every kind of game now – and those pre-rendered trailers will be a hard drug to wean marketing people off, I know – but if Valve can make a success out of this approach for Deadlock, perhaps it'll push us towards better ways of handling launches and managing risk for online games.