Counter-Strike: Classic Offensive wanted to recreate the original Counter-Strike 1.6 experience on Global Offensive, but Valve didn’t give the nod.
The team behind Counter-Strike: Classic Offensive (henceforth referred to as CS:CO) took to Twitter to announce that the Steam release had been rejected and that the application had been shelved after eight years in development. On December 29th, the developers wrote that they had submitted a build to Steam for evaluation in October, and despite the usual 3-5 business days for Steamworks to respond, that didn’t happen here, and Valve pulled the app without explanation, and that was a very desperate move by Gabe Newell’s team.
Steam release status:
Classic Offensive has been submitted for build review since October 6th, Steam have yet to review the build which “takes 3-5 business days”
We did not receive any ETA or response from Steamworks.
Planned release was December 25th for the mod’s anniversary pic.twitter.com/fs63L5PckX
— Classic Offensive (@csco_dev) December 29, 2024
CS:CO was accepted into Steam’s now-defunct Greenlight program in 2017, and according to ZooL, the mod’s project lead, they started experimenting with modding Counter-Strike: Global Offensive back in 2015. They designed the mod as a reimagining of Counter-Strike 1.6 on the Source engine. It was meant to be an alternative that didn’t have cosmetic items and microtransactions. The team said they did not use the leaked Source engine source code to make everything fit for Valve, who even had some developers interested in the project. Even the demands of the legal team were taken into account, as the name Counter-Strike was removed from the project’s name.
— Classic Offensive (@csco_dev) January 11, 2025
“Since submitting our build to Steamworks, we’ve received an automated message from Steam support saying that our app has been retired without any explanation. This is devastating as we’ve been working on this project for almost 8 years. We don’t understand what happened, we went through Steam Greenlight in 2017, talked to legal to know if it was possible for us to release on Steam. We even discussed with some of the developers on various Valve projects, and they were very cooperative in helping us find the means to release back then. After some requested legal changes due to the use of Valve’s IP, we were off to a good start, our mod page was created on Steamworks, things looked promising and the team was extremely motivated.
Steamworks requested that we complete the build before we could release it, and now that we have, we are unable to release it. The project has followed the guidelines for releasing a mod on Steam, we’ve followed the requirements and recommendations to the letter, no leaked code has been used or illegal actions taken, for those wondering, we’ve played by their rules the whole time, sometimes even to the detriment of the quality of the mod. No one at Valve has told us to stop what we have been doing all these years, no formal request of any kind, yet this feels like an even worse form of cease and desist at this point. Many people at Valve are aware of our projects and many others, but have refused to communicate with us since late 2020. We feel that we have been treated unfairly and blinded by our own passion for the game, like many other projects before us. We now feel compelled to tell any modding team associated with Valve projects to reconsider what they’re doing if their only way to publish is through Steam, especially multiplayer mods, as they will likely be rejected as we were. We do not believe that our case is an isolated one. Going forward, we’ll be trying to get back in touch with Valve staff, as well as companies associated with Counter-Strike in general, to try and get things moving in the right direction in the hopes that this issue can be resolved,” the team wrote on Twitter.
Two Reddit users, SlayerN and abyssalsolitude, pointed to the CS:CO team’s 2022 posts. According to the team, after Valve’s modding and licensing changes, it is clear that they will either kill the project or hack the files with every security update to fix issues that ruin mods. There is no mention of using leaked code, as they are using a 2020 build with security holes and a hacked dedicated server to even play online within a team. A ModDB post at the same time reported similar things, and here the team mentioned that they had requested access to their source code from Vave, but had not received a positive response.
Comment
byu/Turbostrider27 from discussion
inpcgaming
Comment
byu/will-powers from discussion
inGames
Following @valvesoftware‘s update on modding and license access, it is now very clear that our only solutions are now either cancelling the project or hacking the core files on every security update in order to fix our mod-breaking issues.https://t.co/sbOiSqOqBx pic.twitter.com/WY0lRCNCcu
— Classic Offensive (@csco_dev) June 4, 2022
So they did not get both the source code and the license, and would not be able to support online play due to security updates in Counter-Strike: Global Offensive. All they could do was patch the games by updating the binaries and plugins, wait for Steam (which hasn’t happened in six years), or release an insecure version that didn’t have these bugs (but that would be too old and risky). They got tired of sending emails and started patching the game, which is complex and requires caution. They couldn’t use the source code for legal reasons, so they would have had to patch the binaries for each security patch…
In the meantime, Valve had already replaced Counter-Strike: Global Offensive with Counter-Strike 2, and the need to license and patch files meant there was no chance of a release… but it’s still a passion project.
Source: PCGamer
Leave a Reply