After seemingly hyping up the long awaited Source 2 overhaul of Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, Valve have pulled the trigger and unleashed “Counter-Strike 2” for all players in a seemingly unfinished manner.
Danger Zone and War Games are among the game modes and features not currently present inside of Counter-Strike 2 as they were for Global Offensive, though I’d wager that the first major update for CS2 will re-introduce these game modes and players will praise Valve for reintroducing previously present features in CS2.
Better still Valve has overwritten the Steam entry for CS:GO essentially forcing players into updating to the latest CS2 build, meaning the only way to play CS:GO would be to go into the Steam settings for CS2 and enable Beta 1.37.7.4 but you’ll be limited to community servers only, of which community servers aren’t featured in Counter-Strike 2 as of this moment.
Counter-Strike is possibly the pinnacle of eSports at this point in time, having usurped DOTA 2’s player counts and “major” average viewership for a couple years now, CSGO peaked not all that long ago maintaining a peak concurrent player count of around a million which has since increased to around 1.3 million players peak since the introduction of Counter-Strike 2.
However its launch hasn’t been well received by professional players in the Counter-Strike scene, which is understandable given how every single revised iteration of CS seemingly launches with multitudes of issues, Source and Global Offensive were initially the same when they first released, however other issues arise in the forms of loss of support for older operating systems such as Windows 7 / 8 and MacOS.
The explanation is rather simple, Valve are dropping support for Windows 7 and Windows 8 operating systems starting from January 1st 2024, despite the fact that Windows 7 and 8 are modern enough operating systems, NVIDIA and AMD have long since abandoned driver support for these operating systems alongside Google Chrome which is partially used by the Steam Client.
Valve had discreetly eliminated the macOS symbol from the Counter-Strike 2 product page on Steam. while users have managed to get Windows 7 to launch Counter-Strike 2 it’s causing a monumental issue that could result in a game ban.
Several players have taken to Reddit and the Steam forums to share their experiences of being unexpectedly banned, seemingly without valid reasons. Of course they could be lying, deflecting however enough thread have arisen for what the Steam Hardware Survey deems to be 0.06% of its test base I’m going to give them the benefit of the doubt as this particular issue appears to be specific to CS2 on Windows 7.
A significant number of Windows 7 users who have been banned in Counter-Strike 2 have already contacted Valve for clarification on the issue. However, they are still awaiting an official response from the company.
It may take a little while for Valve to actually respond to the outcries and potentially revert these game bans, as they have done in the past numerous times for false positives including professional player Krimz who received a temporary VAC ban that lasted a few days, but considering how Windows 7 and 8 operating systems are being phased out entirely by Valve by the start of next year and how Counter-Strike 2 does not natively support these older operating systems I genuinely doubt they’re going to be rushing out a hotfix to allow players to continue using their preferred OS as it clearly isn’t a priority for them.
To avoid the risk of unexpected game bans, it is strongly advised that players utilizing Windows 7 and Windows 8 operating systems refrain from playing CS2 until Valve makes an official announcement regarding the issue and potentially provides a solution.
