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Deadlock (Valve's Unannounced Title) Passes 12k Peak Players in Closed Alpha
(files.catbox.moe)
https://steamdb.info/app/1422450/charts/
Valve keeping up with the trend of "worst kept secrets". You need an invite to join the alpha but since everyone who owns it can refer their friends, it spread very quickly.
I've been playing it the past few days and it's honestly very fun. Still a bit rough around the edges (especially in terms of balance) since it's in early access, but it has serious potential to be dota 2 levels of popular.
For the unaware, Deadlock is a 3rd person shooter MOBA. It feels like a mix of Dota and Overwatch/Team Fortress. Nobody is allowed to share footage or screenshots, but obviously with so many playing there's a ton of leaks out there.
Valve is probably perfectly happy with just making sure proton compatibility is good. They don't expect developers to change their whole workflow to cater to the Deck, that's why they've done so much work with proton.
Valve is happy that games break all the time? Yeah, sure buddy. If anybody at Valve was happy with that, maybe that Microsoft agent should lose their job.
The point of cross-platform middleware is specifically not to "change their whole workflow". 🙄
Valve is also doing much work with SDL and so on to target native development, that's why it's embarrassing that they don't target their own platform. All successful platform holders treat their platform as 1st class citizens: Sony targets PlayStation from day 1 of game development, so does Nintendo with Switch. Apple is not prioritizing Windows either.
Failing platforms are those where the platform vendor doesn't even believe enough in it to properly support it. Since over a decade Microsoft makes ARM-based Surface devices and to this day Microsoft has ported not a single game, not even casual stuff like Minesweeper, over to Windows ARM. "Microsoft is perfectly happy with just making sure Prism compatibility is good" and yet emulated applications crash, perform worse, and result in battery drain. Similar with Steam Deck: The only way to ensure games perform to their best and don't unexpectedly break on an update is proper SteamOS native versions.