It is a dark day for one of esports oldest competitive communities. At 10:11 AM, April 22nd, Twitter user @nikkehtine broke news in a public service announcement that gamers should avoid playing Team Fortress 2, Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, or "ANY VALVE MULTIPLAYER GAMES" due to a malicious person leaking the source code of Valve games in an attempt to harm the player base and Valve.

As is so common with these type of stories, the first original notification of the source code leak was found on 4chan's /V/ imageboard -- a popular internet hangout for PC gamers of all varieties.

As the news began to spread, @nikkehtine continued to share information in the way of Discord screenshots explaining possible motives behind the leak and how gamers can protect their PC's from harm by avoiding Valve multiplayer games entirely. It was even mentioned that games running on heavily modified version of the Source engine like Apex Legends are "most likely" not affected. Legends running on a heavily modified version of the Source engine.

The Details

According to sources such as SteamDB and PCgamesn.com, the leaked source code dates back to 2018. Despite the code being out of date, many fear that it could still allow creative hackers to introduce dangerous exploits into the game.

As of today, known TF2 community servers like Creators.TF and Red Sun have indefinitely ceased running their servers are have urged players to avoid playing online multiplayer Valve games into the issue as been resolved.

More news on this story will be covered as it develops. As of now, there have been no confirmed reports of successful hacks or anything malicious happening to TF2 players, but the risk is certainly there.