What I am saying that is not nearly enough, it is lazy, you don’t have to change the core game to add more aspects to it, more modes and more content that compliments the competitive core.
I think you have no idea what you’re talking about. They’ve tried that multiple times. They made gun game when CSGO released and nobody cares about gungame. They made some other game mode as well, which I don’t even remember what it was called because nobody cared about that either. They made a 2 man competitive mode called wingman and that at least got some attention because that was competitive, but largely people stuck with the 5v5. They added danger zone, a CS take on battle royales, and nobody cares about that either. They even tried gradually bringing new maps into the competitive map pool by adding them to the casual playlist and nobody played them. Even now the last regular update (which was literally today) added the retakes gamemode back and I doubt the core audience cares.
The reason you don’t see any other kind of content in CS is because the core audience doesn’t care about any other content. For the majority of the playerbase only the gamemode that exists is competitive and everything else is irrelevant. In fact the core audience is so anal about competitive game mode they start bitching when new maps get added. You’re complaining about something that isn’t even true because Valve does try different things, but you only hear about competitive, skins, boxes and other cosmetics because that’s all the core audience cares about.
shrugs this is the self-fulfilling prophecy of this kind of game design, there are WAY more players that would have been interested in that kind of thing but they left a long time ago because they were ignored in favor of the toxic competitive playerbase.
It is optimizing for a local maximum, one which is a dead end and only appears to be the only way forward because the parameters have narrowed so far for what the game can be that there is no longer any room to get out of that rut because everybody else who didn’t fit on that local maximum has left and is no longer giving feedback on why they got bored and left.
All of this casino crap is just attempting to forestall the inveitable that the community will not let anything change because the developers self-selected for a community of players that are toxic about any kind of change even if it doesn’t effect them.
Now you’ve completely pivoted away from your original point of Valve being lazy and not doing anything to whatever the fuck this is.
shrugs this is the self-fulfilling prophecy of this kind of game design, there are WAY more players that would have been interested in that kind of thing but they left a long time ago because they were ignored in favor of the toxic competitive playerbase.
I gave you examples of Valve trying different things from the start of CSGO, before the e-sports and competitive scene had fully cemented themselves as the central piece. These fictional players who supposedly left were never there to begin with or they were such an insignificant amount, compared to the people who enjoyed the competitive playlist, that they died out all on their own. And there’s no self-fulfilling game design that caused this, unless you want to walk back you understanding of keeping the competitive core as is.
It is optimizing for a local maximum, one which is a dead end and only appears to be the only way forward because the parameters have narrowed so far for what the game can be that there is no longer any room to get out of that rut because everybody else who didn’t fit on that local maximum has left and is no longer giving feedback on why they got bored and left.
Yes. Chess is so dead. Smash Bros Melee, a game that is completely abandoned by the devs and hasn’t received an update in 20 years is completely dead (spoiler, the melee competitive scene is very much alive despite the game receiving no updates and Nintendo being hostile towards the scene). What is happening to CS isn’t that it’s narrowing itself into some sort of a dead end, it’s the opposite. It’s found what makes it great and that has become the framework in which the game operates. The game doesn’t have to appease the player, the player will learn how to play the game because the game is fun.
Maybe you don’t know how Steam charts work but CS active player over the course of years is only trending upwards. We’ve gone from an average of 300k players in 2015 to an average of 1mil players in 2025. Real world data literally proves you wrong.
CS 2 is a free game, it is nearly a carbon copy of one of the first major popular competitive shooters and it has an intense amount of marketing around it for esports.
I think the game would have had to actively been sabotaged to not have a playerbase at this point.
Global Offensive was a paid game, Counter Strike 2 is a free game, I would obviously expect more people to play a free game than a paid one.
Even F2P games drop off in player count as people come try it out and decide it’s not for them and never play again. CS being free does not explain the yearly upward trend in active player count.
I think you have no idea what you’re talking about. They’ve tried that multiple times. They made gun game when CSGO released and nobody cares about gungame. They made some other game mode as well, which I don’t even remember what it was called because nobody cared about that either. They made a 2 man competitive mode called wingman and that at least got some attention because that was competitive, but largely people stuck with the 5v5. They added danger zone, a CS take on battle royales, and nobody cares about that either. They even tried gradually bringing new maps into the competitive map pool by adding them to the casual playlist and nobody played them. Even now the last regular update (which was literally today) added the retakes gamemode back and I doubt the core audience cares.
The reason you don’t see any other kind of content in CS is because the core audience doesn’t care about any other content. For the majority of the playerbase only the gamemode that exists is competitive and everything else is irrelevant. In fact the core audience is so anal about competitive game mode they start bitching when new maps get added. You’re complaining about something that isn’t even true because Valve does try different things, but you only hear about competitive, skins, boxes and other cosmetics because that’s all the core audience cares about.
shrugs this is the self-fulfilling prophecy of this kind of game design, there are WAY more players that would have been interested in that kind of thing but they left a long time ago because they were ignored in favor of the toxic competitive playerbase.
It is optimizing for a local maximum, one which is a dead end and only appears to be the only way forward because the parameters have narrowed so far for what the game can be that there is no longer any room to get out of that rut because everybody else who didn’t fit on that local maximum has left and is no longer giving feedback on why they got bored and left.
All of this casino crap is just attempting to forestall the inveitable that the community will not let anything change because the developers self-selected for a community of players that are toxic about any kind of change even if it doesn’t effect them.
Now you’ve completely pivoted away from your original point of Valve being lazy and not doing anything to whatever the fuck this is.
I gave you examples of Valve trying different things from the start of CSGO, before the e-sports and competitive scene had fully cemented themselves as the central piece. These fictional players who supposedly left were never there to begin with or they were such an insignificant amount, compared to the people who enjoyed the competitive playlist, that they died out all on their own. And there’s no self-fulfilling game design that caused this, unless you want to walk back you understanding of keeping the competitive core as is.
Yes. Chess is so dead. Smash Bros Melee, a game that is completely abandoned by the devs and hasn’t received an update in 20 years is completely dead (spoiler, the melee competitive scene is very much alive despite the game receiving no updates and Nintendo being hostile towards the scene). What is happening to CS isn’t that it’s narrowing itself into some sort of a dead end, it’s the opposite. It’s found what makes it great and that has become the framework in which the game operates. The game doesn’t have to appease the player, the player will learn how to play the game because the game is fun.
Maybe you don’t know how Steam charts work but CS active player over the course of years is only trending upwards. We’ve gone from an average of 300k players in 2015 to an average of 1mil players in 2025. Real world data literally proves you wrong.
CS 2 is a free game, it is nearly a carbon copy of one of the first major popular competitive shooters and it has an intense amount of marketing around it for esports.
I think the game would have had to actively been sabotaged to not have a playerbase at this point.
Global Offensive was a paid game, Counter Strike 2 is a free game, I would obviously expect more people to play a free game than a paid one.
Even F2P games drop off in player count as people come try it out and decide it’s not for them and never play again. CS being free does not explain the yearly upward trend in active player count.