Valve begins to cut down CS2 player base as the full release approaches

CS2 has been in testing for the past several months and some of the players who were given keys to its early version are starting to say that they can no longer play the game. Apparently, their access has been revoked.

The reason for this is unclear, but some suspect that as the launch date draws near, Valve will keep fewer and fewer players as part of the pilot audience or testing group.

The incident

The way the CS:GO community found out about some of the tester’s fate was through Reddit. Someone complained about the issue and a lot of other people confirmed that they too had had their access revoked by Valve.

Clearly, this is not a cheating issue. Rather, it has something to do with the company’s policies. It’s well-known that Valve doesn’t do a spectacular job of communicating with its community. In some cases, things can get pretty awkward.

This is just one example. The reason why it’s strange to kick your own testers without letting them know what your plans are is that they’ve been testing your game for free. In this day and age, information travels quickly and it’s enough to post a simple tweet.

Instead, the community is left to wonder why a lot of players who had received early access to CS2 have been denied that access out of the blue, without any explanation. A simple message of any kind would have been enough.

When will CS2 get released?

Right now, everything indicates that CS2 will be released this Summer. In other words, we expect it to become available in 1-3 months. The current version of Counter-Strike is more than 10 years old but in the past 12 months, it has seen a massive growth in its player base.

In May last year, the game had 564.000 average concurrent players. Now it has more than 920.000. This was absolutely spectacular, especially because we’re talking about a Valve game. The company is known for its unwillingness to aggressively advertise its games. But despite this policy, CS:GO has grown by two-thirds in a single year.

Many believe that after the release of CS2, the game’s popularity will skyrocket. There are two reasons why Counter-Strike is already a popular game and the third reason will be the improvements made by CS2.

The first two reasons are skins and esports. When you can make money trading skins or get involved in esports, it makes perfect sense to choose CS over most of the other esports.

Header: Valve Corporation