An ambitious Counter-Strike mod to emulate the OG 1.6 experience in Global Offensive has been rejected by Valve after 8 years of development

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Masked Counter-Terrorist in helmet in forefront with sunglasses and beret-wearing CT in background touching headset

Ina post on December 29, the Classic Offensive team wrote that they had submitted a build of the mod for review in October, and that they were still waiting to hear from Steamworks despite a usual turnaround of three to five business days. On January 11, the Classic Offensive team shared a longform message stating that Valve “retired our app without any reason explained. This is devastating as we’ve worked on the project for almost eight years.”

pic.twitter.com/7Z07uD8MqqJanuary 11, 2025

The Classic Offensive team stated that it did not useleaked Source engine code, despite having the opportunity to do so, in order to keep things above board. The Classic Offensive team also said that they had been in contact with developers at Valve who were interested in the project, and that they had responded to requests from Valve’s legal team like removing “Counter-Strike” from the project’s name.

“We now feel required to tell any modding team related to Valve projects to reconsider what they’re doing if their sole way of releasing is through Steam, especially multiplayer mods, as they will probably get rejected the way we did. We do not think our case is an isolated one at all.”

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“Following [Valve’s] update on modding and license access,” reads aClassic Offensive tweetfrom June 4, 2022, “it is now very clear that our only solutions are now either cancelling the project or hacking the core files on every security update in order to fix our mod-breaking issues.” In a follow-up tweet, the Classic Offensive team wrote, “There is no leaked code involved. We’re using a build from 2020 that has security exploits and a hacked dedicated server to be able to even play online while working internally.”

In aModDB updatefrom around the same time, the team wrote, “When we passed Steam Greenlight back in 2017, we had a few email conversations with Valve and CS:GO devs, where we got to explain issues we had with modding CS:GO and how we could remedy them. Sadly, it never really got anywhere. Two years later we asked about getting a license to access their source code, which didn’t result in a positive answer.”

[November 2021] LAW RPG - Grenade enhancements - Molotov - Ballistic Shield - YouTubeWatch On

[November 2021] LAW RPG - Grenade enhancements - Molotov - Ballistic Shield - YouTube

Absent that license and CSGO source code access, the mod would not have been able to support online play due to CSGO’s security updates. “The only solutions are to patch the game ourselves through plugins/binary patching, wait for them to fix it (it’s been 6 years), or release an unsafe version that didn’t have those issues (way too old and risky),” the team wrote.

“You’ve guessed it, we got tired of sending them emails and went the patching route to continue our work, which is extremely complicated and requires us to be careful about how we go about it,” the Classic Offensive team wrote. “For legal reasons, we cannot use the source code that got leaked, meaning we’ll have to patch the existing binaries released with CS:GO’s latest security fixes.”

I’m sympathetic to the Classic Offensive team: The project is a longtime, noncommercial labor of love that’s eaten up its creators' free time for the better part of the past decade. Faced with a choice of abandoning 6 years of work on a largely modding-unfriendly game or rolling the dice on “hacking the core files on every security update,” the route they went with makes sense, especially absent clear word either way from Valve. Much of the company’s mystique comes from its black box nature, the inscrutablepint-sizedpowerhouse that remade PC gaming. The dark side of this can manifest in examples ofuneven moderation and approvalof games on Steam,complaints from former employeesabout its freeform internal structure, andwhatever happenedlast summer with Deadlock.

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