At the end of August, those waiting for Half-Life 3 got new hope. This time, the reason was not another insider tip, rumor, or update for one of Valve's games, but a large leak of the company's internal files.
Blogger-dataminer Gabe Follower recently reported that someone leaked 12 TB of internal Valve builds and game assets. The materials date back to the period from 2003 to 2013:
The leak included early versions of Portal 2, Left 4 Dead, CS:GO, F-Stop, and possibly EP3. The community is still studying the materials, so the next few days could be crazy… Among other things, the "Weaponizer" from early Half-Life 2: Episode 3 was found there.
Now dataminers and ordinary fans are exploring the discovered files; for example, one of the early builds of the online shooter Counter-Strike: Global Offensive (CS:GO) was found – back then it was still a "modified version of Counter-Strike: Source".
Gabe Follower noted that this leak is not the result of a hacker attack, but a banal error by Valve itself:
There was no hack: it has been confirmed that everything from the "Steam2 Teraleak" was obtained through a publicly accessible endpoint [server address]. This is Valve's fault…