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.
Somebody needs to tell the games team that they make their own operating system. This is Windows-only. WTF.
Runs perfectly fine on Linux though, with DX11 or Vulkan. On Windows, Vulkan has some performance issues that make it quite unenjoyable, but in Linux for me it plays a lot better with Vulkan than Windows DX11.
Runs perfectly fine on Linux though
The quality of Proton is not the point, the point is that they’re not dogfooding their own platform. They’ll likely follow the same course as CS2: Lengthy prerelease test exclusively on Windows, then a few days before actual release someone will port the game to Linux/SteamOS and release day is the first day of the Linux port’s alpha test.
How can anybody at Valve expect game publishers to take Steam Deck and SteamOS seriously if the developer of the actual platform is not dogfooding it with their own games?
I’m with you in principle, but I think it’s unlikely that Valve are building the game themselves, given that they haven’t done much of that in ages.
It’s reasonable to think their first priorities were finding a development studio [Edit: or even in-house developers] capable producing a good game, and helping them to do so. If the developers are most familiar with Windows tools and APIs, then the path to a successful game would be letting them use those, at least to begin with.
Let’s just hope that they’re being guided along to way toward design decisions that make a native port relatively easy if the game turns out to be good.
Edit:
The project is reportedly led by “IceFrog”, which looked like a studio name when I first read it, but it’s apparently a person. So maybe this is in-house development after all. Great! It would be nice to see Valve making significant games again.
Nevertheless, gathering a team with the talent and vision to make a good game is harder than finding people who can learn a certain API or platform, so if they have the former, it would make sense to let them target the platform they already know and get the game out the door. Doing it in-house just makes it even easier for Valve’s linux folks to guide them in design choices that would simplify multiplatform support later. (Cross-platform development isn’t all that hard if you plan for it from the start instead of painting yourself into a corner.) If the game is well received, it would then make sense to invest more time into training the devs on linux and doing a linux-native port.
Or to put it another way: Yes, Valve has an OS that keeps them independent from Windows, but that’s just one tool in their kit. Proton is another tool. That gives Valve flexibility in how they bring a game to market, and how they prioritize/schedule various phases of the project. This still-unannounced game might be Windows-only for now, but I would not assume that will be forever.
Ice frog is the handle of the dude that took dota from tryndamere and ryze and turned it into dota all star the version of dota most people think of when they think of dota 1.
Dota 2 wasn’t that popular.
It literally has the second most concurrent players of any game on Steam at the moment and still has over half of the concurrent player numbers compared to its peak 8 years ago.
Yo be fair a large and I do mean VERY large chunk of those players are in the Chinese custom games. It’s not abnormal for like a third or more of the player base of dota 2 at any given time to be playing the custom Chinese games.
Dota 2 is as much a games platform as it is a game it self. Much like warcraft 3 was, or roblox or fortnite is now.
There’s been instances where a new update for some of the more popular Chinese custom games can spike the number of people playing. Them to half the entire player base.
It’s very very fair to say dota 2 isn’t that popular. Cause the game itself isn’t… It’s custom game modes and gatchas are.
Hell there’s one custom game that’s literally a mobile gatcha game that i saw pulling over 60k players by itself.
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