Valve was the target of a major leak involving about 12 TB of data associated with Steam, including internal versions of games stored on the company's servers. This material covers a ten-year period, specifically between 2003 and 2013, and has the potential to reveal unreleased content from several titles.
The information was made available by content creator GabeFollower, who is known for his investigations into Valve's games and projects. He stated that the dataset contains not only the company's own titles but also compilations of games developed by third parties and distributed through the platform.
According to GabeFollower, access to the files did not occur through a conventional hacking attack or social engineering. On the contrary, the material was exposed due to security flaws that Valve itself left open.
A notable aspect is that the person who found the data did not possess all the games whose files were accessible. The leaked content ends in 2013, when Valve discontinued the Steam2 infrastructure and began using SteamPipe, the content distribution system adopted by Steam.
By covering approximately a decade of development, the leak may contain early versions, discarded materials, and other behind-the-scenes details of games released during this period. One of the mentioned projects is F-Stop, a canceled game that would have been a prequel to Portal. In this project, the player would use an Aperture Science Laboratories camera to photograph items and then make them appear in the scene, but the concept never reached the market.
This leak may provide new insights into the development of this project and other content that never appeared in the commercial editions of Valve's games. Besides Valve's projects, the material is not limited to them; players have begun analyzing compilations of titles from other companies that were also stored on Steam's servers.
Among the first examples identified is a January 2011 compilation of Spec Ops: The Line, which would only be commercially released in 2012. Due to the volume of about 12 TB of files covering various titles, the analysis of the material is still in its initial phase, and new discoveries about old games and canceled projects may emerge as the files are examined.
Given its size and the amount of content involved, this case is already being compared to the Nintendo Gigaleak, a series of leaks that exposed source code, prototypes, and other internal materials related to Nintendo's games. The report about the Steam leak was initially published in Olhar Digital.