Valve justifies CS2’s release date

Recently, a lot of players have criticized Counter-Strike 2 and said that the game is hardly playable in competitive tournaments. S1mple, the best player in the history of CS:GO, went as far as taking an extended break, calling the game completely unplayable until it gets fixed.

In the last 30 days, CS2 lost millions of active players, going from 976.000 average concurrent players to just 817.000. At the same time, the game’s recent reviews on Steam (and we’re talking about 157.000 of them), have been mixed. Only 58% of them are positive, which is an alarming indicator of just how bad CS2 is right now.

To many, it feels like CS2 is still in beta and that removing CS:GO under these circumstances is completely unjustified. Lots of amazing CS:GO features and game modes have not been included in the initial CS2 launch, which further adds to the community’s disappointment.

In reaction to all this mess, Valve felt the need to respond to the community and justify the game’s release date.

Exclusive interview: Valve’s @CounterStrike dev team on the past, present and future of Counter-Strike 2 https://t.co/BmpKyBupku

— PC Gamer (@pcgamer) October 27, 2023

Valve’s philosophy

It’s well-known that Valve has a game development philosophy that focuses on player feedback. The company would rather release an unpolished game and then perfect it using feedback from millions of players than try to figure out everything in-house.

This may seem like a good idea from a company’s point of view. But the players themselves don’t see it that way. When you take away from them a great game that they’ve become accustomed to, they expect something that’s at least as good as it in return.

What people don’t want to do is to spend potentially a whole year playing something that’s not ready to be played. Nobody wants to be a company’s unpaid tester for that long. And when the game’s most famous player quits overnight, that’s guaranteed to have an impact on the whole community.

Valve’s recent response to the criticism was that it plans to introduce new weapons for CS2, bring back the missing game modes from CS:GO, and continue to polish the game for years to come.

One issue, however, is what they said in relation to the subtick system. According to them, the system works (for the most part) exactly as intended. But many pro players, who are very familiar with every aspect of Counter-Strike, said the opposite.

We’ll have to see how the game improves over the next 12-14 months. By 2025, maybe we’ll have an FPS game we can be proud of.

Header: Valve