Anika Begay
A new Valve game seems to be on the horizon. Thousands of players have received invites to a game called Stalla team-based shooter with multiplayer online battle arena (MOBA) elements. While Valve hasn’t formally announced it yet, screenshots, gameplay, and even playtimes are already popping up online.
As of this writing, Valve has yet to say one way or another whether the game is theirs. It also doesn’t appear that any effort has been made to remove it. Stall from Steam, where more than 15,000 people were playing it as of Tuesday, according to SteamDB. The all-time high, reached on Monday, was 18,254 players.
It is unclear for how long Stall is available to play, although one user on the game’s subreddit claims to have been playing it for months. Screenshots and gameplay footage on platforms like X and YouTube have been circulating for days.
Despite Valve’s silence (the company did not respond to WIRED’s request for comment), the mystery could prove a boon for the game. The developer behind critically acclaimed hits like Half life, PortalAND Team Fortress 2Valve is notoriously secretive, often in ways that only fuel hype for its titles. Gamers have been waiting for the sequel to Half Life 2 for nearly two decades, with little or no information from the company.
According to The Verge, which published a hands-on preview of StallIt’s a 6v6 shooter reminiscent of Blizzard’s Look beyond. “Your team of heroes attempts to dominate a map by slowly wearing down the opposing team and pushing them back,” Sean Hollister wrote in his preview. “But you’re also leading an army of NPCs that trudge down four different lanes to destroy the opposing team’s stationary defenses, much like Dota 2 or other MOBA games.”
Hollister has since been banned from the game, presumably for his article. A game launch pop-up he shared in his article warns that the game is still in “early development” and asks players to “not share anything about the game with anyone.” (Hollister says he managed to bypass this request by pressing the Escape key.)
Online, some gamers have been angry with The Verge for reporting the title, which currently requires an invite to play, but it only seems to have increased interest in it no matter what. It ends up being.
When, and it will be, Stall be available in a wider release? That remains a mystery.
