That's probably silly, of course, but I do think there's grief among CS:GO players and it is understandable. I don't want to overblow things but there's almost some tinge of a relationship ending, brushing aside whatever negatives happened on the way, thinking of the good times, facing up to an unknown future. We don't think of Valve, as one of the pillars of PC gaming, as a group of people that all but delete games, an act that runs contrary to the spirit of this open platform.ĬS:GO was a part of our lives and we've all been with it so long that you think back on those times like a journey. This isn't a universal comparison though: Despite the fact the Bungie regularly cuts material from Destiny 2 and places it in an inaccessible Content Vault (possibly to return in the future), the studio hasn't pulled the plug on the original Destiny, which you can still buy and play today on last-gen consoles. We've written a lot about Overwatch's shaky baton-pass to Overwatch 2. You can't return to the 2019 versions of Fortnite, PUBG, Apex Legends, or Rainbow Six: Siege. Call of Duty: Warzone made its transition to Warzone 2.0 by nuking the game's map, Verdansk, in an in-game event in 2021. We're used to this sort of thing happening in modern multiplayer games like Fortnite or Destiny, which regularly remove substantial components, partly in order to combat file size bloat. 'We don't think of Valve, as one of the pillars of PC gaming, as a group of people that all but delete games.' It reminds me of that friend, it reminds me of that night, and I've been using it in CS:GO ever since. I remember a friend and I agonising one night over whether to stick £20 each into case keys or just buy some skins we wanted: I ended up buying a StatTrak AK-47 Case Hardened for about £13, a skin that many years later is now worth an unbelievable £500+. gambling crap skins to win other crap skins, not the money side of it). I remember when Valve introduced tournament item drops and my casual relationship with the Majors became all of a sudden very intense, Twitch chat taken over with endless (and superstitious) 'drop' comments, and I went headfirst into extremely low-stakes skin gambling (i.e. When I think back over my time in CS:GO there are plays I remember, for sure, and the camaraderie and the various people I played with over that span. Even if every single aspect of CS2 was an improvement over CS:GO, and that is far from a given, it cannot on day one replace that connection with longstanding players. That comfort and familiarity, the sheer time spent, not to mention the money invested, makes CS:GO feel meaningful to players. From playing on a low-end laptop during my early teenage years to now having a full gaming setup, this game has been there for me through thick and thin.' I doubt that Maxon's petition to ' Bring back CS:GO as a standalone game' will meet with much success, but their justification reminds us of how many younger PC gamers grew up in this shooter: 'CS:GO has been an integral part of my life since I was 13 years old. That all rubs up, however, against the fact that CS:GO has been such a part of peoples' lives for so long. 'CS:GO has been an integral part of my life since I was 13 years old.' Maxon It wasn't a great time in the CS community and, while CS:GO eventually overcame those choppy beginnings to become the de facto Counter-Strike experience (essentially when it introduced skins and item boxes in 2013), it was seen by some for a time as an interloper. CS:GO at launch was not quite the game it became, but it instantly split the playerbase between those that just wanted to stick with CS1.6 (or even CS:Source) and those who moved onto CS:GO.

Was it the wrong decision? It's hard to say it was, and there's one incident in CS history that is especially useful context to this: the launch of CS:GO. CS:GO is playable as a 'beta' build within the Steam Properties menu for CS2, where it's labeled unceremoniously as 'csgo_demo_viewer- 1.38.7.9.' You can't play competitive matchmaking, but you can play offline with bots. There is a mostly-official way to keep playing it. The old Steam page URL for CS:GO now redirects to CS2's.ĬS:GO has been retired, it hasn't been completely wiped from existence. When you search Steam for 'csgo,' Counter-Strike 2 is the top result. 11 years after its launch in August 2012, CS:GO no longer has a Steam page listing. But it's still weird to see that CS:GO, the most-played game on Steam since 2014, has been scrubbed from Steam.

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