Valve's Deadlock is maybe, sort of, possibly officially announced now? The developer put up a Steam page for Deadlock but they have not yet made any formal announcement about the game.
Valve also lifted restrictions on players being able to stream Deadlock, put up news articles about Deadlock (without getting their account banned...), and talk about Deadlock. Those restrictions being lifted were officially shared via the official Deadlock Discord a very short time ago today. That official announcement also notes that "nothing else is changing with our state of development." Deadlock will remain as invite-only and will "continue to be in an early development stage with lots of temporary art and experimental gameplay."
There is obvious no estimated date on when Deadlock will start to be finalized or "released." Until then, you can always just ask a Steam friend to shoot you an invite. Valve allows it so that anybody with access to Deadlock can invite as many of their Steam friends as they like.
The Steam page description for Deadlock is about as generic as you can get right now.
Deadlock is a multiplayer game in early development.
An official page for Deadlock is also now live on Twitch. As everyone is free to stream the game, you can probably see some gameplay live right now to see what it's all about.
Having played a bit of Deadlock, I can say that it's more akin to something like DOTA and the old Monday Night Combat games, which was already very MOBA-like to begin with. Deadlock features lanes, creeps, a "jungle" of sorts, its take on Roshan, towers, items and gear, leveling up and different characters that have unique abilities. To break it down even further, it's DOTA but with a fourth main lane, different setting, and is now a third-person shooter. It's also a lot of fun so far.
