Valve rebuilt Deadlock's version of New York and announced six new heroes in an update it posted on September 29. In the same post it set out, in its own words, how much of the game it still considers unfinished.
The update is called City Never Sleeps. Valve published it as an official announcement on Deadlock's own Steam news channel and its own forums, not as an offhand remark from a single developer.
What Valve actually said about the state of the game
Valve used the word once, thanking players for their feedback "despite the game being unfinished". It did not say the game was unready for a public release, and it never used that phrase.
The company wrote that after its previous major update there was "still a good amount of work we wanted to do on the core game itself". That work had to come "before we moved onto more polish phases of the game development".
Valve then named parts of the game it has not reached. Midboss, Guardians and Walkers are things it considers important "but just haven't gotten to yet".
Hero remodels sit later still. Valve said those were always something it would handle "towards the end of early development".
Progression and hero customization are in the build, but provisionally. Valve called them features it wants "to be able to adjust and significantly change based on feedback before the game is fully released".
Some of the work may never ship at all. Valve described large item redesigns and alternate game modes as "more speculative", and said it is not "100% sure if they will be released or not".
That pace has been defended from inside the company before. A Valve veteran recently argued that bigger teams would not make Valve faster.
The six heroes arrive two a week
The six are Deadman Danny, Nurse Harrow, Solomon, Baba, Violet and Rat King. None of them was playable when the update went live.
Players vote on the release order instead. Valve says two heroes release a week, on Tuesdays and Fridays at 2:00pm PT, with the first scheduled for October 2.
Voting now happens in a new pregame lobby. The winning team's votes count double, and a first win of the day doubles a player's votes again.
The map work is the bulk of the update. Valve added four districts called the Theater, Chinatown, Haunted Lot and Plaza, and says the old neutral camps "have been replaced by a variety of creatures with new behaviors".
A roaming vendor called the Broker also turns up. He swaps high tier items for corrupted versions that carry "random negative attributes from a predefined set", and Valve says he leaves once the first new hero arrives.
How anyone gets into Deadlock
The access rules have not moved. Deadlock's Steam page still reads "Access to Deadlock is currently limited to friend invites via our playtesters".
Valve publishes no sign-up form, waitlist or queue. An invite from someone already playing is the only route the company documents, and no region limits are listed either way.
Valve has also never given a release date. The Steam listing shows "To be announced" for both the release date and the planned release date, and every system requirement field reads TBD.
How big this unreleased game already is
Steam's own numbers are the honest measure here. Deadlock sat 16th on the Most Played chart at the time of writing, with 61,996 players in game and a daily peak of 137,360.
That is a game with no store availability and no public sign-up, charting alongside titles that have shipped. Valve's own monthly most played rankings are usually filled with finished releases.
Shipping unfinished work to a live audience is a habit at Valve. The company did much the same when it added an experimental Pyrowave codec to Steam Remote Play.
Those player figures move constantly, and a large update inflates them. Valve's public player-count API returns nothing for Deadlock, so the chart is the only official reading available.
What the announcement never does is attach a date to any of it. Valve lists what is left to build, says hero remodels come "towards the end of early development", and leaves the end of that period open. The only firm date in the whole post belongs to a hero vote.
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