By the time I get this blog post up, you’ll have probably heard about the supposed leaking of the TF2 and CSGO source code on a certain imageboard that at this rate will probably haunt everything I write about. This anonymous leak is widely believed to have originated from a friend of Tyler McVicker, better known as the constantly suffering YouTuber Valve News Network. The story that I’ve seen repeated on Twitter is that this friend got removed from a Discord server for being a transphobic arsehole and decided to respond to this by leaking everything he was shared with the wider internet – presumably in an attempt to ruin McVicker’s career. This quite understandably set a small corner of the internet ablaze, with TF2 servers going offline due to security concerns and random people on Twitter getting concerningly mad about the whole thing. I’m writing this just after it was revealed that the leaked code was “given to many people in May 2018 by a mentally unstable source who wanted to cause damage to Valve” and that Valve found no reason for players to be alarmed or to avoid using current builds of their games. However, the leaked source code is arguably the least interesting part of the story (or at least it is to me, someone who has documented their love-hate relationship with CSGO in the past and has no intentions of relapsing). The anonymous arsehole behind the leak also dumped chatlogs of Tyler talking to an unconfirmed Valve source, something he apparently shared with multiple close Discord friends. Now I’m not here to play journalist (and trust me you shouldn’t trust this blog for anything like that), but I feel as if these leaked chatlogs give us an interesting glimpse into the experience of being a minor internet personality and the weird power-plays inherent to being a big deal in a community that only five people actively care about.
