Paradox Interactive, the game development and publishing house behind modern classics such as Crusader Kings 3 and Cities: Skylines among myriad others, was likely getting ready to launch its next major grand strategy title, Victoria 3, sometime this year. These plans have now, however, been foiled in a truly spectacular fashion.
Sources now claim that Paradox Interactive has suffered a massive leak that has resulted in Victoria 3 getting fully leaked online. Effectively, the entirety of the game's current beta build is now available for download via shady channels, and it would seem that it all started in a familiar place: 4chan.
Victoria 3 was announced in May 2021, and though the game didn't yet have a full official release date, the expectation was that it would come out sometime during 2023 at the latest. Now, however, it would seem that the beta build of the game has been leaked by a 4chan user, with it quickly getting circulated through the community via torrenting and general piracy domains. It is unknown how old the leaked build of the game is at this time, as there wasn't any real information shared alongside the actual copy of the game.
Billed as Paradox Interactive's most detailed historical title yet, Victoria 3 takes players back to the 19th century and the beginning of the Industrial Age, tasking them with the management and proliferation of one of the 100 different countries. In broad terms, Victoria games have been less about warfighting than the acclaimed Crusader Kings 3, for example, and more about careful socioeconomic planning, thus helping the franchise stand out on the market.
Curiously, Paradox Interactive games seem to attract particularly toxic individuals, to the point where some of them take to heavily disparaging the developers over this leaked and incomplete version of the game. The issue is so pervasive that Paradox Interactive developers are demoralized by forum members who interact with them, and it's unlikely that this unfinished build of Victoria 3 goes uncriticized.
Older gamers may recall that Crysis 2 was leaked in a similar fashion back in 2011, with the beta version of the game quickly rising to the top of every piracy website's list of popular downloads. In the end, the incident didn't seem to damage Crysis 2 in the long run, though there's no telling how the Victoria 3 leak might affect the game's development at this time. Paradox Interactive is yet to issue a statement on the matter.
Victoria 3 is currently in active development for PC.