Valve is one of the biggest video game companies in the world. They’re responsible for some of gaming’s most revered experiences. Half-Life and Half-Life 2 broke the mold twice. Portal made everyone think in portals. Counter-Strike and DOTA 2 are two of the biggest multiplayer games on the planet, and both host million dollar tournaments regularly.

But Valve’s games are not why they’re so big. Steam, a video game sales platform/digital rights management system, is why Valve is estimated to make more profit per employee than Apple, Microsoft and Google. As a proud Oceanian, I love per Capita measurements.

Steam is the primary sales platform for video games on PC. It collects all your games in one place, keeps them updated where necessary, provides backend infrastructure for multiplayer games, incentivises playtime through a variety of methods… it’s the beginning and end of PC games for a lot of people.

Those people are missing out on some great stuff, but that’s neither here nor there.

Of the stars in the video gaming galaxy, Steam is one of the largest. And as such, it creates a giant gravitational well, pulling all sorts of space junk into its orbit. There are a wide variety of endeavours created solely because Steam exists. There are content creators who rely entirely on Steam to share their tepid, checklisted reviews. There are countless game studios that exist solely to create meme-tastic games to eek a few dollars out of children who peruse the store and stumble across the latest skibidi platformer. And there are sites like SteamDB and SteamCharts that use backend APIs from Valve to provide all sorts of statistics—often the only stats available because video game publishers are notoriously secretive. 

It is through these sites that we can see that the unannounced “Deadlock” is currently one of the most popular games around. But there’s a twist, because Deadlock doesn’t exist.

Or at least, it doesn’t exist so far as the media are concerned. Verge wrote a story about the game, detailing how their writer circumvented the complicated ‘please don’t share details regarding our game’ system, and their account was summarily banned from matchmaking. Any videos that go up around the game are DMCA removed. It’s being streamed on Twitch, but discovery is difficult and anyone caught showcasing the game is, you guessed it, banned from matchmaking.

It seems that Valve is doing whatever it can to stop the spread of Deadlock, and it’s not working.

I’m not going to talk about Deadlock, because, and I can’t stress this enough, I haven’t played it. You haven’t either. We couldn’t have a discussion about it, even if we wanted to, because Deadlock doesn’t exist.

But I did want to talk about a few things in relation to it.

For example, I think Verge did the right thing in reporting on playing the game. I didn’t think the reporting itself was particularly insightful, but I think the impulse is solid. Verge’s writer describes Deadlock as a Overwatch style hero-shooter with a little MOBA influence, which is a bit like describing a horse as a ‘cow-like farm animal’ because both creatures have four legs and live in paddocks.

But they have a duty to their readers, and they fulfilled that duty. They saw something newsworthy, and they reported on it. That is journalism.

That said, I understand Valve banning them from matchmaking as well. They didn’t remove the game from their library, they simply shut off their ability to use the online service.

Sean Hollister exhaustively details how they circumvented the ‘please don’t talk about this game’ agreement, so they were playing the game without agreeing to the terms required to play the game online. That seems pretty open and shut to me? Only a sovereign citizen would think that ‘technically circumventing the agreement’ would put them in an advantageous position in this situation, surely.

At the very least, if you were going to skip this agreement and then write about the game, surely you wouldn’t rub it in the game provider’s face, right.

If I talked about Deadlock—and I haven’t, because it doesn’t exist, but if I did—I would cop any ban sweet on the chin, because I broke the agreement. That’s how it works.

But there is something else at play here. While you’re not supposed to talk about Deadlock, it’s very obviously supposed to be shared around. And, more than that, it’s very obviously being shared around. There’s a system within the game itself for sharing Deadlock invites, and it’s the only way for people to get into the game right now. You can’t search for it on Steam. You can’t apply to play it on a website. If you have an invite to Deadlock, someone has specifically shared it with you. There are 300 people on my Friends list. If I was in the Deadlock playtest, all of them would have gotten an invite.

So what is Valve playing at here? They own the biggest video game marketplace in the world. They can advertise whatever they want, whenever they want, to millions of people. For a lot of people Steam launches when they start their computer. Deadlock could be the first thing those people see.

Why try to virally market a game when they could traditionally market it for, if not free, a line item adjustment?

There are a few factors at play here, probably. The first is that Valve has a notoriously bad track record with supporting games it feels have ‘failed’. Or, perhaps more accurately, the threshold for success at Valve is extremely high, and anything that slips below it is discarded like yesterday’s trash. For evidence, see Artifact and Underlords (I’m still sore about one of those).

So a viral soft launch allows them to put Deadlock out into the world without it needing to succeed immediately. Instead of being endlessly analysed by the internet discourse machine, Deadlock can be tried, tested, and if it doesn’t appear to have what it takes, shelved and then never talked about again, like Half-Life 3.

Yeah, I said it. Half-Life 3 is never happening. Quote me on it*.

By divorcing the mythical game from the discourse, the idea of a meta is more difficult to force, too. Instead of watching a youtuber or twitch streamer bust out a broken build and then ham-fistedly copying it, players are having to develop these ideas on their own. Essentially Valve has created a situation where everyone is stuck on the Explorer side of the spectrum, instead of the Tourist side.

And the viral marketing element can’t be overlooked. They’ve created an in-group, and people are dying to get in. It’s spreading like wildfire as a result. And it cost them zero marketing dollars. If they finally lift the curtain on it, people will talk about it anyway. I would, if I’d played the game, but I haven’t, because it doesn’t exist.

Marketing is a big deal at the end of the day. I wish I lived in a world where the best ideas would simply climb to the top like big beautiful flowers in an opium poppy field, but that simply isn’t how it works. Competing for focus is a zero-sum game. Most people can’t give their attention to more than one thing at a time. If something is succeeding, that means something else is failing.

So if you want your flower to see the sun, you need to give it every chance to get to the top. I have a book I want everybody to read. Not Blackbirded. I do want everyone to read that, I’m just not talking about it right now. If you haven’t read it though, you can do that here.

But I have a book coming out soon that I want people to read, and I’d like to get it in front of people. So I’m very interested in the different ways things are being marketed—especially if they’re being marketed for free, because I have no money. Could I follow the Deadlock method?

No. I don’t own the world’s largest book marketplace and I don’t have a decades long history of releasing high profile, popular books. Most of my most famous writing has been deeply unpopular, even if it was all correct. So no, the Deadlock viral release system will not work for me.

I’ll probably try something like it anyway though, because I am poor and bad at marketing and while I might be a genius at some things, I am a stone cold idiot at others.

Anyway, onto other things!

Writing wise, I believe we have passed the 50% mark with editing Heavens! Which is very exciting. I also feel like we’re over a pretty big hill with the editing, so we might pick up some pace from here. But I don’t know that for certain.

I haven’t being playing a lot of Deadlock and I can’t tell you anything about it. That’s the game I haven’t been playing. I watched the new Alien film, Alien Romulus, and I thought it was very good except for when it felt the need to remind us it was an Alien film via references to other Alien films. I was actually aware of its ties to the Alien films by way of all the Aliens, thanks.

Reading wise I’ve been getting into On Earth As It Is In Hell by Brian Hodge. It’s a Hellboy book. My brother got me into the Hellboy comics, and I love Brian Hodge’s writing (I think his influence on my own stuff is generally apparent). This book is great. I took it with me on a trip to Tasmania and I had a great time sitting around in the frigid cold reading about Angels and stuff.

*If it does happen and you do quote me on it, you know I’ll just say they did it to spite me. You’ve read my book you magnificent bastard.