It’s messed-up and weird that CS:GO is just gone

Valve has launched Counter-Strike 2 as part of which it has mothballed Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, the latter being arguably the most popular competitive game in the world and definitely the most popular on Steam. From CS2’s first announcement Valve has been clear that this was the next step for the series, going so far as to name CS2 “the CS:GO killer” in its Twitter bio, though that playful phrase has since been replaced.

But it’s still weird to see that CS:GO, the most-played game on Steam since 2014, has been scrubbed from Steam. 11 years after its launch in August 2012, CS:GO no longer has a Steam page listing. When you search Steam for “csgo,” Counter-Strike 2 is the top result. The old Steam page URL for CS:GO now redirects to CS2’s.

CS:GO has been retired, it hasn’t been completely wiped from existence. There is a mostly-official way to keep playing it. 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.

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 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. 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.

You can understand why, with the game now operating on an unimaginable scale, Valve would rather be a little bit brutal than try to please everyone. Fact is the developer bent over backwards to ensure that the features that mattered in CS:GO made the transition to CS2, mainly when it comes to weapon and agent skins, because the loss of in-game items would have proven incredibly unpopular, maybe even untenable. That was also a death knell for CS:GO, however, because there’s no way the skins market could keep operating across two separate titles when future CS2 skins are clearly not going to be retrofitted to CS:GO.