Valve is up to something with Counter-Strike… it’s just a question of when Gabe Newell and his team will announce their plans.

Counter-Strike has been around for over two decades. Still, the latest in the series is 2012’s Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, or CS:GO, which has undergone many updates since then but has also been technologically outdated. In the background, however, the game is moving. Source 2, meanwhile, has been moved to the pre-release branch on Steam. Something we haven’t seen from Valve in the last decade and a half has turned up in its code. Left 4 Dead 3? The company is known to be a stranger to 3… (Half-Life 3? Half-Life 2: Episode 3? Portal 3? Team Fortress 3?)

Oddly, a Counter-Strike build refers to it on Twitter. An even more apparent reference has popped up. Valve has trademarked several Counter-Strike names, including a Counter-Strike 2. Valve registered these earlier this week before we reported on Counter-Strike and the Source 2 engine. Either what will happen is that Counter-Strike: Global Offensive will change engines during a significant update (to Source 2), keeping the name, or an update will come that will give CS:GO a new name.

There’s little chance that a new game will be called Counter-Strike 2 because Valve has a more extended history of leaks (two decades ago, Half-Life 2 was leaked, causing Gabe Newell to move it to late 2004), as the Steam registry changes to Counter-Strike: Global Offensive also point more to it being the game that will be changed. However, if such an update is coming, which will also update the technology underneath the game (and we have rarely seen this in free form; most recently, Epic Games pushed Fortnite from Unreal Engine 4 to 5), we have to ask: will the game remain free after this, or will we have to pay for it?

Valve should speak up.

Source: WCCFTech