Leak at Valve reveals several content not used by the company's games

The site PC Gamer reported, this weekend, on the huge leak of files that occurred in the giant of the gamer industry, the Valve. Games whose files have spread over the network are Portal, Counter Strike: Source, Day of Defeat: Source, Half Life 2: Episodes 1 and 2, the multiplayer part of Half-Life 2 and in greater quantity, Team Fortress 2.

According to the news portal, the leaks were obtained by someone impersonating the pseudonym WandererLeaker, who initially started making the files available through Discord. According to this person, she had already had enough time to rummage through the hundreds of virtual folders on her computer's HD, and after receiving threats every time she tried to send the files anywhere, she decided to give it all up.  

I do not care anymore. I played around with this a lot for a few years, I just didn't upload it because I got threatened every time. A feather. I have no legal obligation to these files. No longer. They were in my possession since 2016.

Despite the large amount of leaked files, with more than 60 gigabytes just for the game Team Fortress 2, which includes virtually all assets of art resulting from development in a package that serves to be shared externally by potential partners, Valve's leak does not come close to the call “Gigaleak” suffered by Nintendo, occurred in 2021. 

On that occasion, practically the entire history of the company in the form of confidential digital files was released on the Internet, in the biggest leak since the emergence of the industry. The amount of leaked data was so great that even today many of the files from this leak have not been properly identified.

No case of TF2, the leaked files include details of game modes and tools canceled during development, such as, for example, an eventual RAID, which ended up giving way to the Mann vs. Machine, popular category of matches in the game. It is worth mentioning that there is still much more to be discovered, since the files are quite disorganized. 

This is also due to the longevity of Team Fortress 2, one of the biggest hits of the Valve. The game has been around since 2007, when it was released as part of the The Orange Box, one of the first titles available on the company's digital shopping platform, the Steam.

Interestingly, the leak of files, especially those of Team Fortress 2, gave rise to curious “false leaks” by the game's community in jest. Much of this is older content produced by members of the group in the past, which contains a curious mix of official materials not used in the game with fan modifications, such as a female version of the charismatic soldier of TF2.

The speculations don't stop there. her own Valve launched, as part of the latest update, various editing tools, in order to give independent content creators a way to keep the game alive for much longer. It is quite a coincidence that the data leak occurred just a few weeks later, and the most creative fans of Team Fortress 2 will no doubt have a lot to have fun with from now on with these news.

But it is necessary to point out that the chances of there being news about possible future releases like the already legendary Half-Life 3 among the files found is practically nil. What was made available, as mentioned, is nothing more than a package of files whose purpose is to share development assets with external partners. There's no chance there's anything of a confidential nature, as all of that would have been erased by the company itself before sending the files to outside studios.

A Valve was reached out to PC Gamer for comment on the leak, but there was no response.       

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Sources: GameRant, Nintendo Life, PC Gamer e VG247