Counter-Strike 2 or CS:GO on Source 2? What we know about the new version of the shooter from Valve

At the end of February more and more circumstantial evidence began to appear that very soon CS:GO will be translated into Source 2. Even NVIDIA released a new graphics card driver with profiles for an unknown game with very familiar words in its name – Counter-Strike 2. Hints that the shooter will move to the new engine, have long been coming from both Valve and other sources, but the official information has not been reported. In this article we’ve gathered everything that is known about the potential global changes in CS:GO.

First rumors about CS:GO migration to Source 2

Source 2 – the engine is not new: it appeared in 2015. At that time, Valve translated Dota 2 into it. Subsequently, all new projects of the company were released on the updated version, including Artifact, Dota Underlords, Half-Life: Alyx and others. CS:GO was released in 2012, that is, before Source 2 was completed. And in the case of the shooter Valve did not repeat the scheme with Dota 2 and transfer it to the new engine.

Rumors that the developers will release CS:GO on Source 2, have been actively since the spring of 2020. In late March, an insider told Valve News Network, that the updated version of the game will be released by the end of the summer. However, as it turned out, this information was not reliable, despite the fact that dataminer found plenty of evidence of work in this direction in the files of other projects from Valve.

In June 2020, new details were shared by insider Tyler McVicker. He stated that Valve already had a working build of CS:GO on Source 2 at the time. However, it was not ready for release, because there was a problem with the transfer of user-generated content to the new engine, and the release of the new version was postponed indefinitely.

CS:GO on Source 2 has been frozen?

Despite data from McVicker, dataminer regularly found indirect confirmation that work on CS:GO on Source 2 is not stopped. But almost all doubts were dispelled after lines related to the shooter were found in the Libengine2 library on Steam, which is basically only used on the new engine.

In the summer of 2022, thanks to Rich Presence, several CS:GO developers were spotted playing the shooter on Overpass, Shoots, Inferno, Lake, Shortdust and Italy maps with s2 prefixed. A couple of months later level designer Sean FMPONE Snelling, who created several locations for CS:GO, showed screenshots with the map editor and described the nuances of Santorini’s adaptation to the new engine.

Afterwards there was no point in speculating whether CS:GO will be released on Source 2. There was only a question of when exactly it will be released, although no official confirmation from Valve has not yet been received. But different insiders claimed that Gabe Newell’s company not only continues to test the build on the new engine, but also found a solution to old problems – the same transfer of user-generated content.

When will the new Counter-Strike be released?

In the fall of 2022, fans got the fattest hint from Valve that CS:GO will soon be ported to Source 2. The developers replaced the cover on the shooter’s Twitter feed, where CS:GO was replaced with Counter-Strike with a dot at the end. This correlated with earlier rumors that Valve was considering a rebranding of the shooter. And in early 2023, the cover was changed twice more in just one day. Now it depicts only a simplified logo of the game – the silhouette of a commando.

Valve itself has not commented on the situation and even joked that fans are too fond of conspiracy theories: “It’s just a banner on Twitter.” At the same time, on February 28, a new version of the NVIDIA graphics card driver was released, which included profiles for the unknown game Counter-Strike 2, relating to files cs2.exe and csgos2.exe.

All this time, speculation about the alleged release dates of the shooter has not gone anywhere. For example, Aquarius dataminer said, citing his source, that CS:GO will move to Source 2 in the first quarter of 2023, and fan game under the nickname EyesRedAsTheDvilsDck decrypted Valve’s comment in Twitter riddles about the Illuminati and concluded that the developers have hidden in it the date April 24, 2023. But, as experience has shown, the paths of Valve are inscrutable, so for now fans can only wait for the official data.