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
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