Richard Lewis, a notable journalist and cast in the Counter-Strike community, claims to have received evidence from sources that Valve is getting ready to release a new version of Counter-Strike: Global Offensive in the near future and that a beta could come as early as this month or in April.
This project is said to have the working title Counter-Strike 2 and to have been in development “for some time.” Lewis mentions that Counter-Strike 2 has been a priority for Valve and is one of the reasons why the current version of CS:GO has been “pretty much unattended for some time.”
According to these sources, Counter-Strike 2 will run on the Source 2 engine, and that move “should improve the optimization and graphical fidelity of the game.” It is also said to have, like Valorant, 128-tick servers, which is a number that describes how quickly a game’s server can process information.
Matchmaking will also be improved in this new version, and Valve seems to be hoping that third-party services will not be needed to match players together in a more efficient way.
According to the sources, Counter-Strike 2 is “pretty much ready to go”, but it is said to be unclear what this new version would mean for Counter-Strike: Global Offensive and its competitive scene. As Lewis mentions, Dota 2 moved to Source 2 with a new version called Dota 2 Reborn and it lived alongside the original. Eventually the two versions merged into one.
Another piece of evidence that may suggest that this rumor is true is forthcoming Gabe follows 2, which noted that the latest NVIDIA drivers “introduced support for unknown app executables called ‘csgos2.exe’ and ‘cs2.exe’.”
Gabe Follower 2 also says that they have “fairly reliable information that Valve has been testing CS:GO on Source 2 with the help of third-party QA companies in the US and EU since at least early December. I can’t confirm this 100%, but it’s decent enough to share.”
They also say that this new version “won’t be new game, it won’t be Counter-Strike 2, it won’t even be a rebrand, just CS:GO Source 2. And your skins are fine, they will be available in new version.”
Something strange just happened. The latest NVIDIA drivers introduced support for unknown app executables called “csgos2.exe” and “cs2.exe”. Why the project is called Counter-Strike 2 and what are you cooking @csgo? https://t.co/U9YKlAjwgy pic.twitter.com/PU8Op9uGLq
— Gabe Follower 2 (@gabefollower) 1 March 2023
Again, it’s important to take all of this with a grain of salt and wait for official confirmation, but at least it looks like we won’t have to wait long to see if this is true, unlike some of the more nebulous “I heard so and so is in development” rumors out there.
Despite being released in 2012, Counter-Strike: Global Offensive is still one of the most played Steam games and currently has 583,156 concurrent players, according to SteamDB. The second highest game, Dota 2, has 262,745 players.
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Adam Bankhurst is a news writer for IGN. You can follow him on Twitter @AdamBankhurst and on Ryk.