A long-awaited Counter-Strike mod may have been quietly killed by Valve, and nobody knows what’s next

Classic Offensive, a long-running Counter-Strike community project with an ambitious goal of mixing the best of 1.6 with the innovations of Global Offensive, was finally about to see the light of day after eight years of development, but with the app retired from Steam after an automated review, it seems Valve is either unsupportive or uninterested in this project coming to light.

CS:CO went into “early access” in 2016 and first went through the Steam Greenlight process back in 2017, and its long and arduous development process was coming to a close late last year. Its design goal was to use a wider range of the Source tools available in games like Portal 2 to make a return to the core gameplay experience without a focus on matchmaking, skins and gambling, mixing elements of 1.6 and CS:GO to create something unique and more community-focused. The Counter-Strike mod, penned for a 2024 holiday season release, was ultimately pushed back to early 2025, and today, it seems to have hit a dead end after the app was retired from Steam with no comment from Valve, despite previous interactions.

The mod devs posted a statement on social media that reads in part as such:

“The project has been sticking to the guidelines on how to release a mod on Steam, we’ve followed the requirements and recommendations to the letter, no leaked code was used, or illegal actions were taken for those wondering, we’ve played by their rules the whole time, sometimes even to the detriment of the quality of the mod.

Nobody at Valve told us to stop what we were doing during all those years, no sort of formal request, yet this feels like an even worse form of Cease and Desist at this point. Many people at Valve are aware of our and many other projects, yet have refused to communicate since late 2020. We feel like we were treated unfairly, and have been blinded by our own passion for the game, as many other projects did before.”

Popular CS content creator WarOwl has also weighed in, posting, “They’ve been working their asses off on this mod, and to get dropped without even an explaination (sic!) is a slap in the face to the modding community. I’m not going to speculate on WHY this happened, because we don’t know, but saying nothing leads people to assume the worst.”

While this is an appreciable sentiment, the complete lack of silence from Valve’s end for over four years seems like an odd thing to ignore all the way up to the mod’s release. A discussion thread on the /r/globaloffensive subreddit generated over 300 comments before the mod team removed it for a supposed violation of the relevancy rules. As the top comment reads, “Valve, please. Counter-Strike was a mod. Your company has regularly hired modders based on their work. Please publish Classic Offensive. It poses no credible threat to you.” While this might still just be a case of automation gone wrong, with a fellow modder mentioning elsewhere that they needed a manual review to highlight the necessary changes for HL1MMod, a new, negative stance from Valve would make it quite clear that the game has—quite literally—changed.