Valve has reportedly suffered one of its biggest leaks yet. More than 12TB of data has surfaced online, which allegedly contains a vast amount of material uploaded to Steam between 2003 and 2013. Not only did this data include the gaming giant’s own titles like Portal 2 and the cancelled Half-Life 2: Episode 3, but also other developers’ games like GTA V, Call of Duty, Dragon Age: Origins, and more.
Now, what is interesting about this is that Steam or Valve wasn’t hacked. A Valve content creator who goes by the name of Scolcer claims this leak was due to the company’s negligence — the data was found publicly available online, ready to be downloaded without a single password to protect it. Gabe Follower, another Valve content creator, corroborated this information, adding that “someone knowledgeable enough simply found an endpoint from where they managed to download all the data without owning the necessary games in their Steam library.”
This dragon’s-hoard-worth of data is currently being called the Steam2 Content Server Dump, or “the Dump” for short, and it was discovered over this past weekend. For context, Steam2 was Valve’s previous content distribution system, which was used during the platform’s early years following Steam’s launch in 2003. The company would later replace it with SteamPipe in 2013, which explains why the leaked data cuts off around this point.
Due to the sheer size of this leak, people are still combing through the data, but they’ve already found some interesting stuff. These include the aforementioned cancelled Half-Life 2: Episode Three, the beta build of Left 4 Dead 2, cut content from Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, a cancelled Portal prequel called F-Stop, and several unreleased but playable versions of Portal 2.
As noted earlier, the leak isn’t just limited to Valve’s own games, as files from several third-party titles have reportedly surfaced as well. These include Grand Theft Auto V, Sid Meier’s Civilization V, Batman: Arkham Asylum, and Sonic the Hedgehog 4: Episode II. In fact, the dump appears to contain files from games that were available on Steam in 2013 or earlier. To put things into perspective, the digital storefront hosted 2,122 games by 2013, according to SteamDB.
Naturally, people are still exploring the leak and trying to piece together what they can find. Needless to say, it will take a lot of time before everything is uncovered. At the time of writing, Valve has not commented on the situation.
