Valve's ineffable Counter-Strike: Global Offensive turned more than a few heads with worry last night. The popular title is one of the most-played games on Steam, boasting a wildly stable professional circuit that has experienced a bit of drift during COVID-19.
Yet the amateur competitive play of Counter-Strike: Global Offensive has continued its climb in popularity on the PC platform, posting consistent records for most concurrent players throughout the pandemic, while the professional North American region seems to destabilize with each passing week. This exponential growth that Valve's title continues to exhibit made the sudden events of last night all the more curious.
Around midnight, Counter-Strike: Global Offensive was removed from Steam. Multiple titles were included in the strange purge that saw databases not recognizing the titles as ever-existing, or that players were inside of the title. For those that were inside of a match, play continued as normal and the player base did not suffer from the sudden apparent deletion of the title. There was rampant speculation involving the apparent deletion of the Steam page for the title, however.
Some joked that it's possible Valve had finally removed every cheater from the CS:GO, or that CS:GO has turned into CS:GONE. The reality is less fanciful, as it tends to be: an alleged Steam API bug removed multiple titles from the store last night, and were slowly re-added over the following two hours. The only public-facing statement made by Valve regarding the mishap comes from the consistently facetious Counter-Strike official Twitter account, where it uploaded a GIF from "The Wolf of Wall-Street."
What is known for an absolute fact is that this isn't the long-awaited unveiling of the Source 2 engine for the title, contrary to multiple claims during the brief disappearance of the title from the Steam page. Multiple Counter-Strike professionals and organizations welcomed Counter-Strike: Global Offensive back after what was likely a harrowing few hours, with appearances from the Astralis organization and third-party matchmaking experiences such as FaceIt.
It's equally important to note that there is no Counter-Strike 2 beta, which has been jokingly referenced with a nod towards the Citadel leak during the downtime. The overall consequence for this error is next to non-existent: there is no sudden closure of Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, and events within the professional circuit will continue as planned prior to the error. The absolute worst is that a developer, somewhere, likely facepalmed.
Counter-Strike: Global Offensive is available now on PC.
Source: SteamDB