Half Life 3 Release Rumors Ignite with Leak

Is the Half Life 3 release date inching closer? After years of speculation and frustration a new leak shows a listing for Half Life 3 on Steam, pushing rumors of a Half Life 3 release back into the spotlight.

Half Life 2 is over a decade old and for much of this time fans have been clamoring for a Half Life 3 release to deliver new gameplay and to finish the story that left many users hanging at the end of the last Half Life game.

We’ve heard multiple times that the Half Life 3 release date announcement was just around the corner, but E3 after E3 and game show after game show passed without an announcement.

After a recent change to package names on the Steam Database we now see a listing for Half Life 3. The change history lists the name Half Life 3 added to this project on Sunday December 6th.

Other portions of  the document shows changed as far back as eight months ago with miscellaneous game notes and properties listed. The last known name for this project is Half Life 3.

We don’t know if this is a project that is in the works from Valve, or if this is a project that someone added to the database and updated with the Half Life 3 name to fuel the fire of Half Life 3 rumors.

Clicking on the Steam Store link from the Half Life 3 page takes you to the main page of the Steam Store, not to a place where you can buy Half Life 3.

The change comes right after the Steam Database added names to projects by using a method that links to Valve’s new help website. This allows the Steam DB to, “guess some app names that were previously unknown based on what packages they are in.”

Valve owns Steam and Valve is also the creator of the Half Life series. Based on this close connection it would make sense to see some kind of Half Life 3 data parsed from the Valve help website. This could be the start of a help document that signals work on the game and offers the promise of a Half Life 3 release date, but it could also be a placeholder so that nothing else takes a spot.

Until this method added Half Life 3 to the Steam Database the project went simply by a number. If this is real, it could hint that the Half Life 3 release date is not something gamers should give up on.