League of Legends and Valorant studio shoots down bogus rumor Tencent handed it $200 million to take on Valve’s hero shooter: “There’s a lot cooking in R&D, but nothing like Deadlock”

Despite viral rumors to the contrary, the studio behind League of Legends and Valorant isn’t cooking up a game that’s anything like Deadlock.

Riot Games’ communications manager, Joe Hixson, has debunked a viral post claiming the studio was making “a new hero shooter to compete with Deadlock” alongside tech conglomerate Tencent. 

“I see lots of crazy rumors, but this is extra fake,” Hixson tweets today. As Hixson also notes, the screenshot in the post below might look very similar to headlines published on news sites like this one, but the headline only exists online on one 4Chan board. The ‘article’ also has a publication date of March 2024, predating Valve’s first private playtest in May.

“Tencent doesn’t fund our [development] like this,” Hixson adds. “That’s not how this works… that’s not how any of this works.” 

Riot Games is seemingly hammering away on something in silence, though whatever it has in production apparently doesn’t resemble Valve’s newest hero shooter MOBA all too much. “There’s a lot cooking in [research and development], but nothing like Deadlock,” Hixson concludes.

Deadlock itself has had a mysterious road to announcement. Valve quietly released a series of invite-only playtests earlier this year with a polite, legally non-binding request to players not to share any details about the game. Obviously, screenshots and footage describing the game as a Frankensteined mix of Overwatch and Dota popped up within weeks, and Deadlock soon attracted tens of thousands of players even before Valve officially lifted the lid on the project.

But Deadlock hasn’t even launched yet, and thus, is probably too young to inspire competitors in the first place, despite early players being smitten with it. A former Overwatch pro called Deadlock “the future of gaming.” And it doesn’t hurt that Valve added anti-cheat features to Deadlock that it never got around to with Team Fortress 2.

The Risk of Rain developers joined Valve less than a month ago, and one of the legendary roguelike’s creators is already working on Deadlock.