Valve Had 40k Worth of Stuff Burgled from their Office

Valve hasn’t exactly been anyone’s favorite company in a good long while, thanks to the whole “making Steam a piling mess” and the “refusing to release any real games in years except a pay-to-play DTCG”, but there’s still an air of mysticism and wonder about the company: after all, Gabe Newell works there, it’s where information on Half-Life 3 would have to live, and for a long time it was considered the premier workplace in the entire games industry. After all: how great must it be to be paid to make literally nothing?!
 
Maybe it was that air of mysticism that lead to one Shawn Shaputis to burgle up to 40k worth of games and swag from Valve’s Lincoln Square South office. Or maybe it was the fact that it was ridiculously easy to do.

According to a fact sheet released from the Commercial Broker’s Association, the Lincoln Square South building has 24-hours security with closed-circuit TV surveillance: which makes the crime all the more ridiculous when you learn that his master plan was literally just wheeling a recycling bin into the office via a stairwell, filling it with computers and games, and leaving. That’s all he had to do. And he got away with it for the better part of a month.

Police were able to pin the crime on him thanks to finding unsold items in his car, and the fact that he kind of admitted to entering the building on the date of the burglary. So. He’s probably not going to get away with it.

In any case, if you were hoping that this burglary would uncover some hidden secrets about Valve’s projects, you’re probably going to be disappointed: even if those computers had secret files on them, they would likely be encrypted and password-protected, which would make accessing them… difficult.

Not impossible, depending on what those passwords are, but unlikely.