Thirteen days without a single build: Deadlock has never been this quiet, and that is good news
Valve usually pushes a build every five hours. Since August 22, nothing — the second-longest silence in 810 builds, with the record falling on Saturday night. All seven previous ones announced a rework or a wave of heroes. Valve itself says "late September".
Deadlock's last build shipped to players on August 22 at 21:44 UTC. Since then, nothing. Not a hotfix, not a technical build, not a byte in the repository that tracks the game's files. Tonight, that makes thirteen days.
To gauge what that means, recall how Valve usually works.
One build every five hours
We track every game version actually delivered to players, through the file that carries its number. Since August 2024 we have counted 810 of them — a little more than one a day on average, but the average hides the point: half of all builds land less than five hours after the previous one, and 78% within twenty-four hours. Valve does not release in patches; Valve pushes continuously, several times a day, fixing as it goes.
In that history, a silence of more than a week is an event. There have been only eight in two years.
The second-longest in the game's history
The current silence is already the second-longest ever recorded. The record has stood since February 2025: 13.9 days, from the 12th to the 25th. It falls on Saturday evening, September 5, if nothing ships before then — and Valve has said nothing will.
Because this silence is no mystery. On August 29, on the official Discord, Yoshi — the team's voice — answered those hoping for an imminent update: "No, we're still working heavily on it. The update has taken longer than expected." And the date: "The best estimate we can make right now is that it will be late September. If we're able to release it sooner, we certainly will, but that is unlikely." The cause, in his words, is "the regular process of playtesting and iteration sometimes taking longer than expected" — not a change of scope.
In other words: the team has stopped shipping because it is preparing something too big to ship in pieces.
What the previous silences announced
This is where the history speaks. Look at what followed each of the long silences.
The February 2025 record, 13.9 days, ended the very same day with the map rework — three lanes instead of four, 214 changes. The January 2025 silence, 12.7 days, preceded by four days the simultaneous arrival of four new heroes. August 2025, 9.8 days, ended on Six New Heroes. November, 9 days, on a 247-change update. April and December preceded by three weeks the shop rework and Old Gods, New Blood.
Seven long silences, seven times a rework or a wave of heroes. At Valve, silence is not a sign of neglect: it is the sound of an entire team on a single build.
What it says about the calendar
"Late September" falls about ten days before October 7, the closing date of Ranked Beta Season 1 — the only date Valve has ever written down. In our review of release rumors, we argued that a Beta Season 2 would take over that day. A major update in late September, followed by a season change in early October, is exactly the sequence you would expect.
What the update contains, Valve has not said, and we will not guess. The game files show nothing — that is precisely the nature of these silences: until the build ships, the repository does not move.
And the players, meanwhile?
They play. On the days with complete data, August 22 to 30, the game ran between 46,000 and 52,000 matches a day, exactly its level of the preceding weeks. The ranked share holds around 31%. Thirteen days without a patch changed nothing in volume; the most recent days show lower figures, but they are still filling in and we do not read them.
Update, September 6. The record fell on the evening of September 5, as announced. This Sunday the silence reaches fifteen days — the longest in the game's history — and the repository still has not moved.
What we cannot claim
A silence can also be a setback. Valve itself says the delay comes from testing; we have no way to check the size of what is being prepared, and seven precedents do not make a law. The correlation between long silences and major updates is clear in the record, but the only certainty is the date Yoshi gave — and Valve itself calls anything earlier "unlikely".
We read the repository every thirty minutes. The first shipped build, whatever it is, will be reported here the same day.
Methodology. The 810 builds are the commits in the GameTracking-Deadlock repository modifying `game/citadel/steam.inf`, from August 10, 2024 to August 22, 2026, timestamped to the minute. Intervals computed between consecutive builds; median 0.21 days, or five hours. Each long silence was cross-checked against our patch database to identify the following update. Yoshi's statements quoted from PCGamesN's August 29, 2026 article, which relays them from the official Discord. Match volume measured on the `match_player` table of deadlock-api.com's public SQL endpoint, excluding the last three days, whose data is still filling in.
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Update, September 11, 2026. We wrote here that Beta Season 1 ends on October 7, as stated in the July 30 patch note. The game's season file holds a different bound: Thursday, October 8, 21:00 UTC. We explain the discrepancy, and why we follow the file, in [our September 11 article](/news/deadlock-season-1-end-date-october-8).