Between 2003 and 2013, Steam distributed games through a system known as Steam2. In February 2013, Valve replaced it with SteamPipe, which remains in use today. The transition stranded a wealth of older game content, prompting completists to seek out pre-2013 installs in hopes of recovering material that was otherwise lost.
It seems, however, that Steam2 never went away, because over the weekend, a so-called “teraleak” of everything stored on the server appeared online. That’s a whole lot of games, and not just games. There are also internal builds and assets from Valve’s own games—including, amongst others, Portal and Portal 2, Half-Life 2 and its sequels Episode 1 and Episode 2, and Left 4 Dead—and also betas, playtesting builds and other private builds from companies whose games were stored on the server for distribution.
Several commentators and Valve watchers on Twitter have claimed that, remarkably, the data was publicly available. (We’ve been unable to confirm this and have reached out to Valve for comment.)
No hacking involved, just verified that everything in Steam2 Teraleak was obtained via a publicly accessable endpoint. It's Valve's fault… https://t.co/4OaWmU7D9p
— Gabe Follower (@gabefollower) August 29, 2026
No ha habido ningún hackeo. Esto 100% culpa de VALVe.
El Teraleak de Steam se ha obtenido desde un sitio que estaba 100% accesible al público. Estaba ahí para que todo el mundo lo descargara. Sin contraseñas. Sin nada. Oculto a simple vista, pero sin ninguna protección.
Esta es… https://t.co/g72vZDr2HE pic.twitter.com/z2TeJGik3F
— Scolcer (@scolcer_) August 30, 2026
Whatever the case, this feels unprecedented—it’s hard to think of any other gaming leak on this scale. Even the Nintendo leak from a few years ago feels modest by comparison, both because of the sheer amount of data in this trove, and because it contains content from developers other than Valve. The data is conveniently organized into indexed “depots,” which appear to essentially be high-level directories. There’s a raw dump of their titles on GitHub, and to give a sense of the scale of the leak, we dumped this into Excel. The result occupied 10,876 lines, although this is an imperfect metric—some games span multiple depots, and vice versa. (The most extreme example of the latter is depot 910, whose title contains the name of 2,700 different games, and appears to be a collection of trailers.)
Ultimately the point is that this is a ton of data that seems to cover pretty much every game released on Steam between 2003 and 2013, and it’s had dataminers/enthusiasts/etc in a feeding frenzy over the weekend, with everyone from Duke Nukem Forever modders to, um, Plants vs Zombies completists frothing at the mouth. So too, of course, have Half-Life fans, who’ve already found scraps here and there that hint at an Episode 3 for Half-Life 2.
The plethora of third-party content that has just leaked will presumably not amuse those third parties, which include some of the biggest names in gaming. A group called Hidden Palace has put together a list of downloadable builds, and it includes prototypes of titles as diverse as Grand Theft Auto III, Crusader Kings II, and Sonic the Hedgehog 4. It’s not clear at this point whether everything in that list will run—some titles have already been removed because they’re missing required assets, and no doubt more will be added as people sift through the huge amount of data. How this affects the relationship publishers like Rockstar, Paradox and Sega have with Valve and Steam remains to be seen; for now, it’s clear that this is not great news for anyone involved.
Source: Gizmodo