Counter-Strike: Global Offensive commonly known as CS:GO is one of the most popular competitive multiplayer shooters of its genre and the launch of the sequel should be a time of celebration, but that’s not the case for all fans of the series.
Counter-Strike 2 launched on 27 September 2023 on PC and as with Overwatch 2, the CS:GO sequel is a free update to the original game and as such, the original has been wiped from all existence.
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PC Gamer reports that one of the only official ways to play the original game is via its ancient beta, which is of course not an ideal build of the game. If you search for the original Counter-Strike: Global Offensive on Steam, you will now be taken to its updated page.
Whether Valve’s move to pull the original CS:GO offline forever proves to be beneficial, even with all the improvements that the sequel brings, remains to be seen. After all, the original game was one of the most popular games on Steam.
According to SteamDB, five months ago, CS:GO garnered an all-time concurrent player peak of 1,818,773. That being said, the signs are looking positive for the sequel, because since the free Counter-Strike 2 update launched, there are currently over 835,000 gamers playing at the time of writing this article, and it has a 24-hour peak of 1,471,730.
Regardless of whether or not the sequel proves to be more successful than the original, it’s still a shame that the classic has suffered the MCU Blip and has evaporated into dust and I think it’s fair to say that not even Ant-Man and the van rat can save the day. Though with the internet being the internet, there will likely soon be unofficial ways to play CS:GO, if not already.
In related news, a Counter-Strike: Global Offensive skin recently sold for $400k of real-life money, yes really, and at this time, developer and publisher Valve has no intention of bringing the sequel to consoles.
Counter-Strike 2 is available now on PC.