Video Games

Counter-Strike 2 announcement and release may be close at hand

Valve could have a surprise in store

Marco Wutz

Counter-Strike 2 announcement and release may be close at hand
Counter-Strike 2 announcement and release may be close at hand /

Valve might have a new version of Counter-Strike up its sleeve, which could be announced this month and immediately enter a playable beta stage. Leaks from a recent NVIDIA drivers update and a report by esports journalist Richard Lewis hint towards an imminent announcement of the new game, which might simply be called Counter-Strike 2.

According to Lewis, this new version of the popular competitive first-person shooter has been worked on by some time at Valve and may get a beta release in the ongoing month. That would explain a recent lack of substantial updates for Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, the currently supported version of the series and most popular game on Steam.

Lewis’ report seems to verify discoveries in NVIDIA’s latest drivers, which support two hitherto unknown applications: csgo2.exe and cs2.exe. NVIDIA introducing support for these two apps could definitely point towards an imminent release of the software.

Counter-Strike 2 will reportedly run on Valve’s own Source 2 engine – not a surprise in the least – and is supposed to feature servers that would bring it up to par with Riot Games’ Valorant at 128 tick.

“The big priority is getting this out and then polishing it, fixing any bugs and bringing it up to the level people expect from CS,” Lewis wrote.

It’s not quite clear how this change of guards would work exactly, though the switch of fellow competitive Valve title Dota 2 to Source 2 may serve as a blueprint. In that case, the community won’t have to fear any drastic gameplay or economy changes, as their hard-earned skin collections will likely remain untouched and their built-up muscle-memory can still carry players to victory.

Valve has not yet commented on these rumors.

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Marco Wutz
MARCO WUTZ

Marco Wutz is a writer from Parkstetten, Germany. He has a degree in Ancient History and a particular love for real-time and turn-based strategy games like StarCraft, Age of Empires, Total War, Age of Wonders, Crusader Kings, and Civilization as well as a soft spot for Genshin Impact and Honkai: Star Rail. He began covering StarCraft 2 as a writer in 2011 for the largest German community around the game and hosted a live tournament on a stage at gamescom 2014 before he went on to work for Bonjwa, one of the country's biggest Twitch channels. He branched out to write in English in 2015 by joining tl.net, the global center of the StarCraft scene run by Team Liquid, which was nominated as the Best Coverage Website of the Year at the Esports Industry Awards in 2017. He worked as a translator on The Crusader Stands Watch, a biography in memory of Dennis "INTERNETHULK" Hawelka, and provided live coverage of many StarCraft 2 events on the social channels of tl.net as well as DreamHack, the world's largest gaming festival. From there, he transitioned into writing about the games industry in general after his graduation, joining GLHF, a content agency specializing in video games coverage for media partners across the globe, in 2021. He has also written for NGL.ONE, kicker, ComputerBild, USA Today's ForTheWin, The Sun, Men's Journal, and Parade. Email: marco.wutz@glhf.gg

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