Valve's PC gaming platform is at the center of a massive information breach
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.
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.
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