1. Although that chart isn't terrible and I probably shouldn't have used the word "dying," I have a feeling it's not going to surpass that peak of ~175k ever again. The real hype for this game was in 2024 and pretty much went away as soon as a lot of people played it and found out it's boring as shit and also woke.
2. Invite only but you can invite anyone on your friends list whenever you want, and there are constantly people on the forum offering to give new invites. Do you honestly believe that there are people who want to play deadlock but aren't able to right now? It's hardly invite only if anyone can get an invite.
3. They should have at the very least finished adding all the stuff CS2 is still missing before moving on to a new project.
1. Dota 2 has a 600k playerbase. There is a huge market for MOBAs, and Deadlock is one that's appealing to not only MOBA players, but FPSs. Every big update causes a huge jump in players, and if they continue diversifying the game modes I really wouldn't be surprised to see this game at the very least match Dota 2 in player count. Stop using woke as a insult, it makes you look retarded.
2. Yes. Your average person is going to look at the steam page, see that it doesn't have a download now button, and walk away, unless they already knew one of their friends played, to which then they'll ask for an invite.
3.
I'm Valves' working on it. I highly doubt dangerzone is coming back. At the end of GO, it took ten minutes to find a match. Everyone who claims they played Dangerzone is wearing rose tinted glasses and nostalgia baiting themselves into actually thinking it was a popular game mode. Even now arms race is 50% bots and is so dead even during peak hours you can still find empty lobbies full of in game bots. Cache is going to come this year.
No one moved on to a new project. I don't understand how people just can't fathom the fact that companies can work on multiple things at once, and some people might not want to work on CS2, especially when half the community is just going to dog pile on them for the littlest of changes. Hell, when season 4 came out and they reduced the amount of time it took to register kills, matching CSGOs, for the next two weeks sloptubers were talking about the few hours that playing the game would get you VAC lived.