A huge Steam leak has revealed the achievement lists of hundreds of games in development.
Exophase, which lets players track their achievements across Xbox, PlayStation, Steam, EA, Blizzard, Epic Games Store and other launchers, suddenly added hundreds (if not thousands) of new games to its Steam section.
The vast majority of these new games are currently still in development, meaning their achievement lists shouldn’t be available yet.
Something appears to have happened, however, which has allowed the site’s tracker to scrape all the achievements from Steam despite the fact it shouldn’t be able to.
The newly added games include numerous anticipated titles, including (but not limited to):
While some of these achievements lists still appear to be work in progress and either have placeholder text or haven’t been localised properly yet, a lot of them contain major spoilers for these upcoming games (which won’t be revealed in this article).
The Kingdom Hearts 4 list, for example, reveals the location of many of the Disney-themed worlds in the game, of which only Coco is known so far.
The above list is only scratching the surface, however, as users have been browsing through the list – which contains many very early games which are only represented by Steam App ID numbers for now and have incomplete achievements – and finding games that haven’t yet been announced (though some of these may also be cancelled games).
This includes an unannounced port of Professor Layton vs Phoenix Wright, an Animal Crossing style Nickelodeon game, a new Tetris game and a new collection of Telltale’s The Walking Dead.
Another game simply contains two achievements for now, one of which says “this is a test achievement”, and the other saying “Welcome to Twin Peaks – Reached the Double R Diner”.
The only Twin Peaks game ever released was Twin Peaks VR, which didn’t feature the Double R Diner. Again, this isn’t necessarily confirmation that a Twin Peaks game is coming, it may have been a cancelled prototype.
Exophase owners believes something went wrong with Valve‘s API
Exophase owner Mike Bendel, known online as x3sphere, explained the situation on the ResetEra forum, saying the leak appears to have been a mistake with Valve’s API, which seems to have lifted the restrictions on access to the achievements.
Responding to a user who suggested that “something has gone catastrophically wrong on Steam’s end”, Bendel replied: “I am the owner of the site and this is what appears to have happened.”
He added: “Seems like a possible screw up on Valve’s end, a bunch of games with achievements that should be private are accessible through the API right now and that’s why they got scanned into the site.
“I usually never see games without an actual name pop up with achievements, yet over the past hour or so a bunch have (when there’s an unknown name we just set it to the AppID).”
Regardless of how it happens, it appears that putting the genie back in the bottle may be different, meaning a whole host of spoilers may start circulating online for countless upcoming games.
This is the second embarrassing leak for Valve in two weeks, and the second to have seemingly been caused by issues with its own data security.
Late last month a vast collection of games, betas and prototypes that were uploaded to Steam over the course of the decade between 2003 and 2013 – a total of around 13 terabytes of data, seemingly containing everything published on Steam during that period – was leaked and made available for download.
It was claimed that the leak – which included early prototypes of Portal 2 and pre-released builds of games like Mirror’s Edge, Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare and Spore – hadn’t necessarily come about as a result of hacking, because the directory was reportedly publicly available and just hadn’t been discovered yet.
