Long live the king. With the arrival of the new year, Valve has officially ended support for the iconic shooter Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, meaning the game will forever be frozen on its current version.
Over a decade after its release, CS:GO laid the foundations as one of the most prolific FPS titles in gaming history, but as of Jan. 1 Valve won’t be updating the title any further, with the development team full steam ahead with Counter-Strike 2. Players will still be able to launch the game via the beta branch in the Steam library, but as it stands, CS:GO is no more.
For a short while at least, players will be able to experience CS:GO (without multiplayer) without many more issues, but as time goes on and Valve makes updates to Counter-Strike’s coordinator, it’s highly likely many features won’t work with CS:GO’s current build and will begin to fail. “Certain functionality that relies on compatibility with the Game Coordinator (e.g., access to inventory) may degrade and/or fail,” Valve says in its CS:GO legacy explainer.
CS2’s much-anticipated arrival in September 2023 was wrought with many game-breaking issues and bugs that Valve has worked tirelessly to squash over the previous few months, but in every case, players were able to turn to CS:GO without a problem. It remains to be seen how long this avenue remains open, however, as the base features of the game will likely crumble as they’re updated with CS2.
CS:GO will go down in history as one of the greatest shooters of all time, spawning generations of competitive players and introducing millions to the FPS genre. The game aged like a fine wine, building a dedicated and hardcore fanbase over its decade-plus lifetime. Stats site SteamCharts recorded a peak of 1,117,517 players in May 2023, and while a third of this number has been lost since CS2’s launch, it remains uncontested for the top spot.
We’ll see now whether Valve has gas in the tank to continue updating the game consistently in 2024 after a flurry of fixes arrived throughout November and December, but one thing is for sure—CS:GO may be gone, but CS isn’t going anywhere.
