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Portal, Half-Life 2 and Team Fortress 2 among huge Valve asset leak

Portal, Half-Life 2 and Team Fortress 2 among huge Valve asset leak

Assets from Valve titles such as Half-Life 2, Portal and Team Fortress 2 have been leaked online.

As spotted by PC Gamer, the party responsible for this leak did so via Discord, with screencaps from that server showing that they had held onto them since 2016. These assets are from a series of repositories, packages that are made to be shared with outside partners.

This is the single biggest asset leak in Valve's history, impacting Portal, Team Fortress 2, Half-Life 2 Episodes 1 and 2 – as well as its multiplayer mode – Counter-Strike: Source and Day of Defeat: Source. No unannounced games have been affected it would seem.

The game most affected by this is Team Fortress 2, with 61GB – pretty much every single asset ever made for the shooter – leaking.

This isn't the first time that Valve has suffered a massive leak. Back in September 2003, the source code for the then-in-development Half-Life 2 was stolen from its servers by German hacker Axel Gembe. This genius was then arrested by the FBI after being invited to discuss a job opportunity at Valve in the US. 

Only last year, Rockstar also suffered a colossal leak, with a huge number of videos of in-development gameplay footage making their way into the wild after a hack.

PCGamesInsider.biz has reached out to Valve for comment. 


PCGamesInsider Contributing Editor

Alex Calvin is a freelance journalist who writes about the business of games. He started out at UK trade paper MCV in 2013 and left as deputy editor over three years later. In June 2017, he joined Steel Media as the editor for new site PCGamesInsider.biz. In October 2019 he left this full-time position at the company but still contributes to the site on a daily basis. He has also written for GamesIndustry.biz, VGC, Games London, The Observer/Guardian and Esquire UK.