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.
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.