On Sunday, a build of the upcoming action game Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2, approximately 70 gigabytes in size, was uploaded to a pirate site. It appears to be one of the late versions of the game, available about a month and a half before its official release. According to a post on 4chan’s /v/ board, noticed by Insider Gaming, the build is dated June 20, 2024. If this is accurate, it essentially represents the final version of Space Marine 2—on July 9, publisher Focus Entertainment announced that the game had gone gold.
Leak Details and Community Reactions
Other outlets have confirmed that the file, presumably a pre-release build of Space Marine 2, is currently hosted on a Russian torrent site, and videos from the build have started appearing on YouTube. The site indicates that more than 500 people have already downloaded the leaked build.
The YouTube account publishing videos from the build did not exercise much caution. When someone in the comments asked where they got the game, they replied, “I can’t say, sorry, these videos risk being taken down, but I would get in trouble if I said where,” and then revealed the obvious source in the same sentence: “just look on a certain .ru site with magnet links, you should know which one.”
Technical Observations and Implications
The leaked videos suggest that the build is not entirely final—for instance, the graphics settings menu contains placeholders instead of screenshots that should show the differences between various settings, such as levels of anti-aliasing and lighting quality. Given such a leak, it is advisable to be wary of spoilers, although this is not particularly critical for this type of game.
Focus Entertainment has yet to comment on this unfortunate event. Let’s hope that sales do not suffer due to this leak; otherwise, we may not see a sequel, or it might become a console exclusive.
