Is Deadlock a Masterclass in Viral Marketing or Genuine Playtest?

In May 2024, headlines started appearing across the gaming space that a new title on Steam, called Deadlock, was hitting player numbers in the thousands. Reportedly invite-only, leaks appeared online later that month, and Valve’s secret under-development MOBA shooter was suddenly in public knowledge.

Fast forward a few months, and the game is averaging over 100,000 players on Steam at any time of the day. Streamers, influencers, and anyone in the gaming space are frantically attempting to get the invite to Deadlock. Only being “announced” in late 2024, with a half built Steam Page with some placeholder images, Deadlock has become a hit, and one of the Steam platform’s biggest games before it’s released.

While there have been early access hits in the past, Deadlock is surpassing them in scale and hype. As the numbers veer towards 200,000 and beyond, and invites spread across Steam Libraries across the world, it starts to beg the question, was this really a closed beta, or some kind of genius marketing move by Valve?

Deadlock’s Surge to the top

Deadlock’s testing phase started in late 2023, although exact dates and initial numbers are unknown. At some point, likely in May 2024, a true private test began. It seems that the first 2,000 or more testors from this were directly invited either by Valve or by existing testors. This is when Deadlock first became known to the world, as public tracking via websites like Steam DB.

Within days, the first leaks had emerged. These leaks showed characters, the gameplay, and more, but details were still scarce. At this time those few thousand players with access began forming the first communities. Discords, private YouTube channels, a Subreddit, and Steam Groups started to be formed. While initially restricted to those with access, these communities quickly grew to include theory crafters, casters, pro players from other games, and more.

Then, in late July, a more public friend-invite system was implemented, and a surge in players began. Between July 28 and Aug. 18, the player count rose from around 2,500 to in excess of 44,000. Players who joined the beta during this time were asked to not leak details via a simple dialog box. However, it was during this time that The Verge, on Aug. 13 published a large reveal of the game, causing controversy, and reportedly leading to a matchmaking ban of the account associated with the journalist.

On the 23rd of August, Valve went public with Deadlock for the first time, publishing a Steam page that just about met minimum guidelines, and a blog post. More importantly, it lifted the ban on Streaming and making videos about the game, causing the streaming numbers for the title to jump enormously. The game jumped from zero to over 100,000 viewers on Twitch, similar to a AAA game release day. What's more, the invites started flowing. Less than a week later, the game had hit 100,000 concurrent players. As we entered September, the game threatened to hit 200,000 users with each passing week, and the number of installations is likely far higher.

Since this soft announcement and release, the game has progressed in a more traditional early access development path. During early days of the beta, online matchmaking was based on timing, with the European servers open later, and US servers starting a little too late for some East Coast players. Now there’s 24-hour matchmaking. There’s blog posts on Steam when new features are added, but still no big promotion. An expected trailer and reveal at The International 2024 never materialized, and Valve hasn’t even really updated its store page since Aug. 23. This doesn’t feel like a marketing campaign, but equally, this is a far more polished game than you’d expect in a beta test. And the game is still beating out day one releases on Steam. So what’s going on?

Valve Doesn’t Market in the Same Way Other Companies Do

It may (or may not) surprise you to find that Valve just doesn’t market games the way other companies do. If we look at its most recent releases, the marketing has been sparse to non-existent outside of their own native Steam platform. 

In 2018 it launched Artifact, specifically catering it to Dota 2 fans. After an initial tease during The International in 2017, the game had little promotion until March 2018 when an onsite interview with Gabe Newell revealed details. The next time Artifact would be directly promoted was at PAX West 2018 when all attendees were given product keys. The final pieces of Artifact’s promotion came on launch when Valve hosted a $10,000 USD Tournament, published webcomics, and offered a month of Dota Plus to anyone who owned the game. By all accounts, this is a much smaller marketing campaign than most mainstream games.

From there, the promotion amounts only shrink. Dota Underlords, Valve’s next game, released in early access in 2019, receiving almost no promotion. The game quickly amassed a large player count (of similar sizes to Deadlock today), but relied only on blog posts and community communications to promote the game. 2020’s Half-Life: Alyx wasn’t announced until the game was almost ready for release, and Valve canceled their only public showcase of the game. And it didn’t need to market CS2 because it ported the entirety of the Counter-Strike: Global Offensive user base, its most popular game, directly over.

Valve’s only conventional marketing campaign came from the Steam Deck. The Steam Deck attracted a far different type of attention due to it being one of Valve’s first proper forays into the world of computer hardware (The Steam Link, Steam Machines, and Steam Controller notwithstanding). And besides advertisements online, media and interview tours, we actually got a full blown publicity stunt as Gabe Newell started showing up to people’s houses in late February 2022, and hand delivering the first Steam Decks.

But what gives? Why doesn’t Valve go in for big PR and marketing campaigns? Part of this is a matter of practicality. Valve releases very few games, and very few products, and almost all of them are successful. It’s earned the kind of reverence that was once common in the gaming industry where they can do no wrong. Think about the former reputations of companies like Bethesda and Blizzard when all of their games were day-one purchases no matter what. Valve doesn’t need to market its games, because even without announcing Deadlock, they can muster 40,000 concurrent players.

But beyond that, it seems like a philosophical decision. In Hollywood, it’s a common adage that you need to spend at least the same amount again that you spent producing the film on the marketing. In gaming, many publishers and larger developers seem to take this same idea, with huge money spent on spots at conventions and showcases. On TV and internet ads. On trailers and teases and reveals. Valve has decided that its products speak for themselves, and the best way to advertise them is to get them into people’s hands as soon as possible.

Valve’s Done this Before

For the best case study on this, you only have to look at Dota 2. While if you Google the release date for Dota 2, it’ll tell you it came out in 2013, anyone with a cursory knowledge knows it was first playable in 2011. After benign revealed a year earlier, the first beta keys were handed out during The International 2011, the inaugural Dota 2 event. The game, notionally still in development, began with just a few thousand people having a copy.

Initially, the game was set to remain in closed beta for almost a year, but Valve scrapped the plan, and lifted NDAs to allow the game to enter open beta. This created a huge hype for the game, as players were desperate to get into the beta. Competitions would give away keys, and Valve would even sell beta keys with cosmetics tied to them over the course of 2011 and 2012. 

For a full year, players struggled to get keys. Or so it seemed. In reality, most everyone who wanted a key received one a few months into 2012, and if you were really looking for one. There also came a kind of prestige with having played the beta, even though the ‘true’ beta period might only have realistically lasted for around eight or nine months. 

Even though the game took almost two years since its initial beta handout to release (July 18, 2013), there was still a surge in players flocking to the game. One that continued almost unabated until 2015 - period of almost constant growth for the first four years of its existence. Valve has effectively created a potent feeling of FOMO, fear of missing out, before the term even existed. And it carried that momentum into release and beyond.

But long after Dota 2’s release, the same theory was applied to CS2, which started as an invite, before taking over its predecessor. At this point, this is just the game plan for Valve. Let the game speak for itself. Let the cottage industry that makes content and news and hype for your game do the work for you. And you can sit back and concentrate on the important things, like tweaking your product to make it even better. 

Early Access and its Traps and Pitfalls

So if the early release with limited playerbase is now par for the course for Valve, why doesn’t everyone do this? Why didn’t Bethesda release Starfield in Early Access and let people defend its flaws until they could fix them? Why doesn’t Rockstar just drop GTA 6 next month, but only for a few thousand people? Well, early access has some stigma to it.

Since Steam Early Access’ incorporation on the platform in 2013, the public opinion on early access games has gone from mostly positive to almost universally negative. A 2020 article by PTW suggested that between 2013 and 2015 the percentage of releases on Steam that had early access rose from 36% to 89%. Early access, it argued, has become a way to launch barebones content with bugs and issues, while still turning a profit. However the criticism persists even when early access versions are free.

What’s worse, in many ways it turns players into unwilling participants in the development process. An article on Theology Gaming expressed how little the author desired to give developers feedback or play incomplete products. Comments on Steam and across the internet echo this feeling.

But one thing it also traps you into is presenting something that’s not your finished product, and players expecting it not to change drastically. Minecraft, one of the most popular games ever made, still has players who prefer the beta versions to the full releases. On Steam Early Access, examples like Darkest Dungeon saw players turn against developers when changes were made to the beta.

And Valve, despite what we’ve established above, isn’t immune to failure. Two Valve titles which we profiled above, Artifact and Dota Underlords, are now effectively dead games. One of them, Underlords, veered dramatically from its original beta vision with its full release. Ironically, the incorporation of the eponymous Underlords was met with derision by players. 

Valve, therefore, has taken on a risky choice to reveal its game in this way. The publicity, the FOMO, the marketing boons it gains from this method, are seemingly directly countered by any development advantage. Players will affix themselves to Deadlock before the game has been released. And any seemingly “wrong” decisions by Valve will be seen as them potentially ruining the game.

The conclusion is simple then: While dressed up as a test, the advantages for Valve fall more heavily in the marketing column. What’s more, Valve has done this multiple times before with Dota 2 and CS2, and now has an entire playbook to execute when it comes to its early access FOMO farming. The only question remains is will it work? Or will Deadlock join Artifact and Underlords in the Valve graveyard.

from AFK Gaming https://ift.tt/lFRv42M