Counter-Strike: Global Offensive returns to Steam

Counter-Strike: Global Offensive makes a sudden re-appearance on steam as a standalone game that can be installed separately. Previously, the game could only be accessed by opting into a beta branch under Counter-Strike 2. When Valve launched Counter-Strike 2, Global Offensive was absorbed into the title, leaving nearly no trace of its existence on steam, making most of the community livid for merging vital statistics such as playtime, public player reviews etc. into the new title. Players also complained about losing their "achievements" from Global Offensive.

Yesterday, in a silent-sudden move, Valve shocked the Counter-Strike community by completely separating Counter-Strike: Global Offensive from Counter-Strike 2. The game reclaims its old store page but remains unlisted. While Counter-Strike: Global Offensive can be downloaded as a standalone game, there is no official support for the title in terms of matchmaking and official game servers. The steam forums blew up with players trying to figure out ways to play CS:GO with other players and the game quickly hit over 60,000 concurrent players.

With no developer support, game servers, matchmaking or even any form of announcement for that matter, Counter-Strike Global: Offensive ascended to #17 on Steam's most played games. The community already seems to have figured out workarounds for online play by hosting dedicated servers and using console commands to join the server despite the community server browser being disabled. Workshop maps made for CS:GO might not load up, returning a version mismatch error due to their Counter-Strike 2 application ID.

While the community has been spinning countless theories behind the move over the last few hours, the actual reason could be something as simple an "engineering cleanup". Having a legacy version of Global Offensive bundled under Counter-Strike 2 is theoretically not optimal, especially when pushing updates. A standalone version of the title just makes things easier to maintain.

As far as tournaments or "throw-back" style events are concerned, In a conversation with Dust2.us, Valve has confirmed that it will not grant licenses to run Global Offensive tournaments.