Valve has officially launched Counter-Strike 2.
Valve shares this description of the game on its official Steam page:
“For over two decades, Counter-Strike has offered an elite competitive experience, one shaped by millions of players from across the globe. And now the next chapter in the CS story is about to begin. This is Counter-Strike 2.
A free upgrade to CS:GO, Counter-Strike 2 marks the largest technical leap in Counter-Strike’s history. Built on the Source 2 engine, Counter-Strike 2 is modernized with realistic physically-based rendering, state of the art networking, and upgraded Community Workshop tools.
In addition to the classic objective-focused gameplay that Counter-Strike pioneered in 1999, Counter-Strike 2 features:
All-new CS Ratings with the updated Premier mode
Global and Regional leaderboards
Upgraded and overhauled maps
Game-changing dynamic smoke grenades
Tick-rate-independent gameplay
Redesigned visual effects and audio
All items from CS:GO moving forward to CS2”
Alongside this launch, Counter-Strike: Global Offensive has been delisted from Steam. Valve describes as a free update to Counter-Strike: Global Offensive on their website, though some fans may disagree. Kawlum points out on Twitter that Valve did not wait until all Counter-Strike: Global Offensive legacy content was carried over to Counter-Strike 2 before they launched the latter game.
This is a genuine issue because part of Counter-Strike: Global Offensive‘s popularity stems from the hundreds of transactions that fans had in the game being relevant and usable in the game for years and years. That content adds up to thousands of dollars for many players.
Now, part of the reason Valve did this may be also directly related to those transactions. Many of that content ended up in grey markets of auction and gambling sites, which Valve did not condone and had no control over. Regardless of the rights players have to their own content, Valve also has a responsibility to all players that they all be treated fairly, and that no players end up cheated through the game.
Hopefully, Valve can replace all that content from the original game to the new one. But then, because of the issues surrounding the grey market for that content, Valve may deliberately choose not to that. For now, these issues haven’t led to a reaction or backlash from players yet. It may be the case that Valve has upgraded and refined Counter-Strike 2 gameplay so much that the players will let it go.
For now, we can note that Counter-Strike 2 has over 7 million reviews, and SteamDB logs over 1 million players. As of this writing, that number is set at 1,176,556 players. You can see our screenshot of this data below.
The Counter-Strike player base has already moved in, and we’ll learn in the coming weeks if they will stay or not.
