‘Counter-Strike 2’ Has Launched But At A Terrible Cost And With Little To Show For It

The launch of Counter-Strike 2 is perplexing for many reasons.

For one, this is not actually the second Counter-Strike. I cut my teeth on Counter-Strike: Source, the predecessor to Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, nearly two decades ago in 2004. That was a remake of the original Counter-Strike that came out in 2000 using Valve’s Source engine. (In fact, most of my time with this franchise was playing Source; I only returned to CS recently after a many-year hiatus).

The upgrade the game got with CS:GO is absolutely worthy of being considered a “second” game if we consider Source merely a remake of the original. By all accounts, this was an opportunity for Valve to put a ‘3’ at the end of one of their games, but that may truly never happen (sorry Half-Life and Left 4 Dead fans!).

But there are other oddities with Valve’s new release. The game was built using the Source 2 engine and it certainly looks better than ever, though the visual improvements may require a PC upgrade for some fans. New smoke effects make smoke grenades more realistic and strategically valuable. And the buy wheel has been replaced with a grid (similar to Valorant though busier). Beyond this, the major changes include:

• Remastered CS:GO maps that look prettier and include some changes, most of which are fairly minor.
• A new subtick system that changes gunplay and is too complicated to explain in detail in this post. Suffice to say, it’s extremely divisive across the community.

Counter-Strike 2 does not include a single new map, however, which is startling. No new maps or guns or other content at all. Just a visual overhaul, a new engine, smokes and subtick. Meanwhile, as CS fans have angrily pointed out, a bunch of features and modes and other content that was in Global Offensive has been removed.

Now, maybe this wouldn’t be such a big deal if Valve hadn’t done something truly baffling and, quite frankly, kind of terrible at the same time: Kill CS:GO entirely.

When CS:GO launched in 2012, Valve did not remove Counter-Strike: Source. In fact, you can still play that game right now on Steam, where recent reviews are praising it as superior to CS2.

User reviews of Counter-Strike 2, meanwhile, look quite stellar—until you realize that not only did Valve kill CS:GO, they simply replaced its store page with Counter-Strike 2, so all the positive reviews over the past 11 years make it look Very Positive indeed.

The more I think about this, the angrier I get. Not only is this somewhat deceitful on Valve’s part, it’s also a horrible thing to do to a video game to just delete it from existence this way. It’s also arrogant and anti-consumer to take away an option from fans that have built a community around this game for over a decade and force them to play the new game instead. I far prefer letting people migrate over naturally because the game plays and looks better and includes new content they want to try out.

Imagine if Activision deleted every Call Of Duty game each year, forcing fans to play the new release. This goes beyond dropping support for an old title. Valve has killed the most popular game on Steam, hoping that its sequel will replace it successfully.

And it probably will. People will probably start to warm up to this release as it gets updated and patched and new content drops. But that doesn’t change the fact that Counter-Strike 2 has launched at a terrible cost and with little to show for it, at least for now. And unlike Counter-Strike: Source, which we can still revisit to compare and contrast, we no longer even have CS:GO to go back to, even if only out of nostalgia. Your content will mostly transfer over and it’s free-to-play and you can still buy expensive loot boxes, but Global Offensive is dead.

What a shame.