While its important to take all this with a grain of salt and wait for official confirmation, there have been some rumors circulating that Counter-Strike 2 may be on the way very soon.
Richard Lewis, a notable journalist and caster within the Counter-Strike community, claims to have received evidence from sources that Valve is getting ready to release a new version of Counter-Strike: Global Offensive in the near future and that a beta may arrive as early as this month or in April.
This project is said to have a working title of Counter-Strike 2 and to have been in development "for some time." Lewis mentions that Counter-Strike 2 has been a priority for Valve and is one of the reasons why the current version of CS:GO has been "largely unattended to for some time."
According to these sources, Counter-Strike 2 will run on the Source 2 engine and that move "should improve the optimisation and graphical fidelity of the game." It is also said to have, much like Valorant, 128-tick servers, which is a number that describes how fast a game's server can process information.
Matchmaking will also be improved in this new version and Valve appears to be hoping that third-party services won't be necessary to put players together in a more efficient way.
According to the sources, Counter-Strike 2 is "about ready to go," but it is said to be unclear what this new version would mean for Counter-Strike: Global Offensive and its competitive scene. As Lewis mentions, Dota 2 moved to Source 2 with a new version called Dota 2 Reborn and it lived alongside the original. Eventually, the two versions merged into one.
Another piece of evidence that may hint towards this rumor being true comes by the way of Gabe Follower 2, who noted that the latest NVIDIA drivers "introduced support for unknown app executables called 'csgos2.exe' and 'cs2.exe.'"
Gabe Follower 2 also says that they have "fairly reliable information that Valve has been testing CS:GO on Source 2 with the help of third-party QA companies in the US and EU since at least early December. I can't confirm this 100%, but it's decent enough to share."
They also say that this new version "won't be new game, it won't be Counter-Strike 2, it won't be even a rebrand, just CS:GO Source 2. And your skins are fine, they will be available in new version."
Something weird just happened. Latest NVIDIA drivers introduced support for unknown app executables called "csgos2.exe" and "cs2.exe". Why project is called Counter-Strike 2 and what are you cooking @csgo? https://t.co/U9YKlAjwgy pic.twitter.com/PU8Op9uGLq
— Gabe Follower 2 (@gabefollower) March 1, 2023
Once again, it's important to take all of this with a grain of salt and wait for official confirmation, but at least it appears we won't have to wait long to see if this is true, unlike some of the more nebulous "I heard so and so is in development" rumors out there.
Despite being released in 2012, Counter-Strike: Global Offensive remains one of the most-played Steam games, and is currently sitting at 583,156 concurrent players, according to SteamDB. The next highest game, Dota 2, has 262,745 players.
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Adam Bankhurst is a news writer for IGN. You can follow him on Twitter @AdamBankhurst and on Twitch.
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