Travel back in time to 2021 and the source codes for The Witcher 3 and Cyberpunk 2077 were suddenly dumped online. You may not remember a big future at the time because the caveat was that fortunately, CD Projekt Red had password-protected the files and hackers did not have the passwords.
Fast forward three years to now and the passwords to unlock the archives have now been posted on 4Chan and, in the main, are confirmed working, meaning anybody with minimal digging can now get their hands on, and unlock the source code for two of the biggest games of the last 15 years.
There is no mention of how the passwords have finally come to light, it could be that it has taken this long to brute force hack them, or somebody with access to the codes has finally let them lose into the wilds.
Passwords for other CDPR games such as Gwent, Thronebreaker, and the next-gen version of The Witcher 3 are also included in the leak.
This will be extremely irritating to the publishers and devs but not actually bring much to the table for game modders. We are already getting mod tools for The Witcher 3 finally which is hugely exciting.
What it will do is let coders and game studios, who might be keen for various reasons, find out about all the trickers used in these great games. That is a much bigger headache for the publisher.
With that said, both games are now relatively old and the issue is likely not as large as the one faced by Insomniac when it had code and information for the next ten years or so recently dumped online.
Other games have been leaked in the past and have failed to cause seismic events to happen, but for the developers and coders seeing their hard work dumped out there for free there will be an understandable frustration that this has happened again.
Readwrite Gaming is not sharing any links to the leaked passwords or source codes.
