Steam achievements for a batch of unreleased and unannounced games leaked this week, turning up on the tracking sites Exophase and SteamDB before Valve said anything about the cause. The steam achievements leak exposed lists for Fable, Persona 6, Kingdom Hearts 4, Judas, Tomb Raider: Legacy of Atlantis and Remedy’s Control Resonant, plus a number of unannounced titles that appeared only by their Steam AppID, with no public name attached.
How the steam achievements leak happened
The person who runs Exophase said on ResetEra that a recent Steam update appears to have briefly made private achievement data readable through the Steam API, and that Exophase’s scraper picked the data up automatically as soon as it became visible. “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,” they wrote, adding that they don’t usually see achievement lists appear for games with no public name attached, “yet over the past hour or so a bunch have,” as KitGuru reported.
A second Valve leak in the same week
This is the second time in a matter of days that Valve’s back end has exposed data it shouldn’t have. A 12TB Steam depot dating back more than a decade had already surfaced online shortly before this achievement leak, though that dataset was historical build data rather than anything tied to games still in development. The achievement leak is the more awkward of the two for Valve, because it touches unreleased and unannounced work rather than old artefacts nobody was actively hiding.
Our take: how fast the story moved
By our arithmetic, the first report on the leak went up 4.8 hours before the follow-up that carried the ResetEra quote from Exophase’s owner. That gap says something about how achievement data spreads once it’s scraped: aggregators publish automatically, and outlets pick the story up within hours, well before a publisher or Valve has said anything official about what went wrong.
What the leaked lists actually show
Achievement lists aren’t spoilers in the way a leaked build or script would be, but they can still reveal chapter structure, boss names, collectible counts and how a game ends, depending on how descriptive a developer chose to make them. For a game like Persona 6, which Atlus hasn’t even announced yet, whatever surfaced is far more likely to be placeholder text than a finished list. Titles closer to release, such as Kingdom Hearts 4 or Tomb Raider: Legacy of Atlantis, are more likely to carry achievement names that resemble what actually ships.
- Fable
- Persona 6
- Kingdom Hearts 4
- Judas
- Tomb Raider: Legacy of Atlantis
- Control Resonant
What to watch next
Valve hasn’t issued a statement on either the achievement exposure or the earlier depot leak, and neither incident has an official cause on record. Whether Valve locks down the API access before more unannounced titles surface, and whether it comments on the fault at all, is what’s worth watching from here.
