A few years ago, we told the story of Counter-Strike in a few paragraphs.
When did it become known about CS:GO?
On August 12, 2011, Valve announced CS:GO. “Counter-Strike took the gaming industry by surprise when the mod became the most popular online PC action game in the world almost immediately after its release in August 1999. For 12 years CS has been one of the most popular games in the world. CS:GO will be released on PC, as well as next-gen consoles and Mac,” said Valve Chief Marketing Officer Doug Lobmardi.
How was the new version of CS received?
CS:GO was released on August 21, 2012. At first, the community did not accept the new version: it resembled Source and was much more demanding on hardware. Players didn’t like new features like Molotov at all: cybersportsmen even wanted to ban them from tournaments.
But Valve did not want to repeat the mistake with CS:Source, when not everyone switched to the new game, continuing to play in 1.6. This time, the company took up its product seriously: constant updates were released, and bugs were fixed. Valve paid special attention to esports (before that, it had not supported it in any way): majors were announced with an insane prize fund of 250 thousand dollars at that time. Added skins that boosted the popularity of CS:GO – and the profits of Valve.
How did CS:GO develop?
Tournament prizes have been growing, as well as online – over the past month, CS:GO has set a record several times. The last one is 1.365 million concurrent players. Valve, on the other hand, rarely updated and changed the game: all the key patches occurred in the early years of development. For the past seven years, rumors have been appearing in the community more and more often about the move of CS:GO to the Source 2 engine. Now these rumors are more like the truth than ever.