Catastrophe: Deadlock’s Steam store page breaks Valve’s own rules, so Valve is going to have to police Valve

Valve’s Deadlock has seemingly broken its own Steam store page rules.

After weeks of not talking about Deadlock, despite it accruing concurrent players in the realm of tens of thousands, Valve finally announced Deadlock for real last week. As first noted by PC Gamer, the tweet below proclaims that Valve has violated the Steam store page rules – which it made up – by not submitting five in-game screenshots of Deadlock for its own store page. 

This is pretty funny, even if the Twitter user is “NOT LAUGHING,” and even if the entire thing is technically accurate. “Screenshots are displayed on your store page, and on other pages where your game may be featured such as the Steam homepage. You must provide at least 5 screenshots of your product,” Valve’s own stipulation reads on the Steamworks documentation. 

Now, yes, it’s worth pointing out that these rules technically apply for Steamworks partners. Is Valve actually a Steamworks partner, if it owns the entire platform? Well, it’s also worth pointing out that Valve previously violated its own terms with an awards sticker on an image for The Orange Box, and summarily removed said awards sticker for violating the rules.

This precedent, which Valve itself set, posits that Valve is technically a Steamworks partner, and therefore must abide by Steamworks’ own rules. What’s funny about this entire situation is that we’re all relying on Valve to police, well, Valve.

At the time of writing, despite Deadlock’s player base being “limited to friend invites via our playtesters,” it’s been able to rise to the highs of 64,000 concurrent players on Steam over just the last few days. Conversely, Sony’s new Concord hasn’t been to hit 700 concurrent players on PC at the same time, showing the highs and lows of live service games.

Take a look at our best MOBAs guide to see the all-time greats that Valve’s brand new hero shooter is going up against.