In what has been dubbed Valve’s ‘biggest leak ever’, tens of thousands of assets – the entire Valve repository – have been reportedly leaked online. This includes previously unseen or cut content for Team Fortress 2, Counter-Strike: Source, Half-Life 2, and Portal – plus more titles and other unassociated assets.
To give a perspective of how immense this leak is, one user verified that the Team Fortress 2 leak alone came in at more than 60 GB. This included unused character models – including a female character – variations of existing maps and designs of deleted ones, new weapon skins, and props.
There are now expectations that modders will use this content to quite literally flood the market.
‘Valve’s Biggest Leak Ever’
In recent weeks, we’ve been covering the news as dozens of older titles have had their source codes or assets leaked online. We’ve seen games like Mortal Kombat II and the cancelled Rayman 4 have their content spill out online, courtesy of leaks, but this event has dwarfed those instances.
On a Discord server (the identity of which we haven’t verified owing to a lockdown at the time of writing), a user named ‘Leakerwanderer’ began dropping links to file repositories that contained alleged assets for a whole host of Valve Source games. In a statement on Discord, this individual offered a little backstory to the files:
I have held onto these since 2016. Most of the filedates are from when I moved them after my computer blew up in 2019 … I also did my toying around with it for a few years, did not upload because I was threatened everytime.
‘Leakerwanderer’
That last part is a little ominous, with Leakerwanderer ultimately claiming that whoever had that hold on them has since disappeared and isn’t in contact with them anymore. Unfortunately for fans of Valve-based franchises, aside from cut content, there’s nothing too revealing coming out of these files thus far.
There were hopes that, hidden in the assets, some reference to Half-Life 3 or Left 4 Dead 3 might be found, but as of yet, nothing has been dug up by the thousands of users poring over the content. For some users, this marks the end of an era – for the Team Fortress 2 fans, for example. It now reveals absolutely everything from end to end inside the game that was released fifteen years ago – there’s nothing that could possibly be hidden now, awaiting deployment.
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For more Insider Gaming news, check out our coverage of Google and Nvidia’s concerns regarding the Activision x Microsoft deal.
