Valve trademarks Deadlock, the Overwatch-style hero shooter it won’t acknowledge but is making no efforts to hide

Are we in line for a Summer Game Fest reveal?

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Valve’s long-rumored hero shooter Deadlock is seemingly becoming more and more of an open secret with each passing day. In the closest thing to an official acknowledgement we’ve gotten yet, Valve has apparently filed a trademark application for the game’s name.

“Deadlock trademark registration is intended to cover the categories of entertainment services, namely, providing online video games,” according toUS Patent and Trademark Office filingsdug up by Gabe Follower onTwitter. The trademark has not yet been granted, but the application is in. The publisher had previously attempted to trademark Neon Prime, the rumored previous title of the project, but that’s now adead application.

We’re reaching the point where rumors about Deadlock don’t really feel like rumors anymore.Alleged leaked images hit the internetearlier in May, quickly followed byapparent in-game footage detailing 19 playable heroes, Bioshock Infinite-esque rails, and Dota-style lanes. This all seemingly ties to an ongoing playtest that’s listed in the Steam backend, whichhas reached 1,000 concurrent playersover the past few days. Apparently, some of those players have elected not to agree to whatever embargo or NDA Valve has in place.

In any case, it seems like the existence of Deadlock is now an open secret. With theSummer Game Fest schedule for 2024set to kick off for real next week, it seems likely a proper reveal is imminent, especially givenValve’s long-standing history with host Geoff Keighley.

Predicting the games of Summer Game Fest 2024: What we expect to see from each of the major publishers.

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Dustin Bailey joined the GamesRadar team as a Staff Writer in May 2022, and is currently based in Missouri. He’s been covering games (with occasional dalliances in the worlds of anime and pro wrestling) since 2015, first as a freelancer, then as a news writer at PCGamesN for nearly five years. His love for games was sparked somewhere between Metal Gear Solid 2 and Knights of the Old Republic, and these days you can usually find him splitting his entertainment time between retro gaming, the latest big action-adventure title, or a long haul in American Truck Simulator.

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