A leak at a multi-billion dollar company like Valve is a huge deal in itself. What happened on Aug. 29 was not merely a leak for the company, however: it was an information breach that affects most, if not all, major video game companies that published a game within a specific timeframe on the popular PC gaming platform, Steam.
Here’s what we know so far.
What’s in the Steam leak?
According to Valve news accounts on social media, the leak is a 12 terabyte file that contains internal builds of every game uploaded to the platform between 2003 and 2013. The breach includes Valve’s own franchises, like Portal and Half-Life, but it also holds beta builds of games owned by publishers big and small alike. So far, fans have found early builds or files related to franchises and games such as Call of Duty, Resident Evil, Sonic the Hedgehog, Mirror’s Edge, Batman: Arkham Asylum, Dragon Age: Origins, Spore, and much more.
The amount of information in this leak is massive, though the scope makes the amount of prototypes and pre-release content included in the leak impossible to know at the current juncture. The games with the most documented findings so far are Valve’s own games. Fans have found things like unused maps, early weapon ideas, unused character designs, and never-before-seen gameplay. For example, there’s footage floating around of a Portal 2 build with a “bullet time” mechanic that slowed down time as players solved puzzles. Fans are particularly taken aback by the discovery of a Cave Johnson Companion Cube dialogue that was cut from Portal 2. The cut content validates some long-standing theories about the nature of Companion Cubes in the games.
How did the Steam leak happen?
Valve has not responded to a request for comment, but users on social media perusing the files claim that this incident did not technically involve hacking or theft of some sort. The files have reportedly been downloaded via a publicly available website that used to function as Valve’s old storage solution before the company switched to a more secure system.
What is F-Stop?
Fans have also found a build to a video game called F-Stop that appears to take place in the Portal universe. Models and early concepts for this unreleased Valve suggest it was a version of Portal 2 where the mechanics revolved around a camera. Diehard Valve fans have been aware of F-Stop for a long time, but the lack of concrete details around it made F-Stop a bigger mystery than the infamous Half-Life 3.
Is Half-Life 3 in the Steam leak?
In a manner of speaking, yes. There’s content in the leak relating to Half-Life 2: Episode 3, the original planned conclusion to the legendary FPS series. HL2E3 was announced by Valve in 2006 but was canceled a few years later after the developer struggled to come up with new ideas for the game. The game was supposed to take place in the Artic and reportedly included mechanics revolving around ice. Sure enough, fans have found data strings and media in the leak that reference objects like an ice gun and a “Weaponizer” gun revealed in the Half-Life 2 20th anniversary documentary. There may be more to come in the following days — again, the leak is massive, so it will take a while for people to peruse it in full.
How does the Steam leak affect other major video games?
The answer to this question depends on what material was uploaded to Steam between the years 2003 and 2013. For some games, early builds largely resemble the finished product. Some “leaks” only contain sparse assets that don’t really reveal anything. In other cases, fans have been able to get unreleased beta builds of games like Sonic the Hedgehog fully up and running.