It's a crisp 20:40 UTC, the much-anticipated full release of CS2 is now out. And it ultimately was a disapointment, launching with only 10 maps and five game modes Premier, Competitive, Wingman, Casual and Deathmatch. Map based factions are gone. Certain quality of life features are gone like left handed view models, viewmodelbob. Optimization was poor and the bugs... So many bugs. CS2's development started right about the end of Half-Life Alyx's development and including the beta of CS2 being 6 months, which is 3 years and 6 months time, CS2 still was half-baked. This unfinished state was in two parts one being that CS2 was somewhat made using legacy code from CS:GO, and it makes some sense CS2 is supposed to be the successor to CSGO. And why bother putting in the effort of actually having a clean slate with no spaghetti code when you have to commit to a ""Summer"" 2023 release date. But also the fact that CS2 is the first game in its series that was soley developed by Valve entirely and not with the help of a second game company. This is to say that there's was less manpower given for the CS2 project, and also considering Valves flat hierarchy could've compounded it's lack of man power. In a way CS2's history will almost be a repeat of CS:GO's with both games taking at least 2 to 2 and a half years before they reached the success they'd hoped for. But even so, for a valve game in the year 2023, Valve almost drop the ball even with allegedly the best video game developers in the industry. Has put a damper as to what kind of quality Valve considers as "Finished".

This bug calls back to a "Simple" time, it's hitboxes not being aligned with the animations of said model. This would occur with aiming down, aiming down sights and CT's defusing the bomb. This would be the first of many times Valve would have to pull through with their promise of "What you see is what you get."

A rather humorous bug that had to go.

For a brief few days it was scary time to have AMD graphics drivers for AMD's "Anti-Lag" feature was messing with CS2's dll files. And VAC actually detects users messing with said dll files and promptly bans them. Although said bans were undone, the biggest case was this german skins trader with 100k worth of skins in his account at the time. And this tweet of the CS2 dev team telling AMD to get their act together.

The CS2 workshop is now open for shop! And said custom maps are free to be used for all kinds of surfing, KZ, Zombie rushing and skin inspecting! And complimented with new, clean, modernish server browser UI. Well about that in-game server browser, it's being abused hard. And still is to this day. Seriously! Get past the Opposing Force tab and with no filters applied just look at the horde of spam on the browser. The average new player just won't bother to venture out to these other community game modes. This neglect from Valve isn't bumping blood into the wider CS community eco system that is of custom game modes and maps. As of June 26th, 2026 nothing has really been done to address this. You're better off using third-party's.

This less than one mb update to many members in the CS2 community was their tipping point. Just this one line of text that almost didn't really need it's own patch note at all, was to many a representation as to how Valve sees CS2. Yet even so we were stuck in time, Valve time. At least the replies under the tweet are hilarious.

CS2's first major update! Valve left the community high and dry for 20 days and came back with an appetizer. Arms Race is back with two maps made for it, Baggage being a really well done remake of the 2012 map. Given a new spice of life with active conver belts to push players to either teams side, and a cute little teasers for the upcoming Armory update! And the remake of Veitnam or what is now "Shoots", this remake is really just an asset flip of Aztec (Before the 2025 remaster). And offers very little new to it's predecessor. And for the first (and last) time CS2 has a new case in the active drop pool, and what's in this case is a new knife for you to spam F+R over and over. You can now custom place all your stickers with an additional sticker slot too! Your wallet is now the limit to your imagination! The Zeusx27 now can recharge it's ammo after 30 seconds (First tested in danger zone). And there now Zeus skins of course. Some quality of life improvements: Like the "Refund All" button, improvements to sub-tick shooting. Patched a bug where players could drop down silently, this was done to reflect the average weight the player is. Peakers advantagehas been tackled here. A now added XP overload icon to show how much a user is dedicated to their hobby. And some more map fixes... And well overall a much needed update for how bare bones this game was then. Lets hope valve won't keep drip-feeding the community game modes...

"Purchased and traded Counter-Strike items will not be visible to other users who view your Steam Inventory for 10 days." Maybe this somewhat helps people to not get scammed? But at the same time it doesn't for if you get scammed, how do you prove it's in their account for ten days to late?

The quality of life feature of left handed first-person viewmodels is now back! Instead of the view model immediately switching to the left, you have to wait out the draw animation. Which I guess is a point for realism. The gernade line-up reticle was made here. And the dropped weapons tab in the buy menu. You surely remember the time when everyone wanted the left-hand back right? Do you see people in your lobbies using left hand? Not much...

"Joystick input is now ignored by default. Joystick input is not an officially supported feature of CS2, but you can restore the old behavior with the -joy launch option." Who actually played console CS:GO?

It had been a good five months since the last major update and the soil was starting to get dry again. And so to curb the community Valve gave us community made content...Where have I seen this before? Congratulations on Pool Dayfor being the first and probably last community map added to Arms Race. Although in CS:GO not one community map made it to Arms race, it's sad to CS2 only having one that got in.

CS2's second """Major""" update! With game play changes such as "Flash bangs and HE grenades no longer prematurely detonate when they exceed their 'stuck bounce' limit"... Ahh but you're in CS for the skins right? Well it's a whole buffet Valve cooked this time! Charms are now a thing, three new weapon collections, a new weapons case, and a new set of stickers! All of which can be acquired with a... Pass? And with this pass comes the reasonably unreasonable price of 15.99 (USD) you can earn stars via earning XP (With no wrong way to play). And with those stars you can gamble to get one of those items in the buffet. This isn't actually the first time Valve introduced such a system. It was first introduced "Broken Fang" but in that game you could outright buy the stars, here you have to pay to play to then gamble. And you don't even get a cool looking coin for your progress. We didn't know it at the time, but this was effectively the first sign of Valve having to transition into a more regulation-friendly monetization model. Looking at the anti-gambling lawsuits Valve faces today, it's easier to see why a more regulation-friendly monetization model has become necessary. But half of what made CS:GO's operations memorable was the cosmetics, but also the broader content built around them. This update is Valve extracting only the monetization from that formula and presenting it as the event itself.

Well it turns out there's actually a wrong way to play for stars. And that wrong way being using a virtual machine hosting a server with a special kind of config on team deathmatch, allowing you to get twice the normal about of XP.

"Fixed a known crash when compiling lighting in Counter-Strike 2 Workshop Tools."

de_Train has made a comeback! And the face lift sets a new precedent that maps that take place at night and with rain effects can work. And that's not all! A new "Damage Prediction" system that you're guaranteed to turn off. And a new "Map quide" annotation system so you can look at the line ups in game without having to see CSTatics on the second screen. Four new community maps have taken place from the previous maps. The saddest change from this update, overpass losing all of its muddy, gross yet jaw droppingly realistic water.

"Fixed a case where a disconnected player could cause a poltergeist CT model to appear in the middle of the map" Are you sure?

You can now rent all items in the CS2 and CS:GO cases for a week. So if you live in a country like the Netherlands where online gambling is banned, you can now give Valve the good old 2 dollars, 50 cents.

You remember this?

489 days since launch and season two of Premier is now out... Yes, four hundread and eighty nine days since launch and finally season two is here. With changes of Train replacing Vertigo, the M4A4 is now one hundread dollars less and the FAMAS being a hundread dollars cheaper and easier to aim.

After nearly a decade in development the long awaited CS fan game Classic Offensive has been given the Nintendo treatment by Valve. Valve has forgotten it's origins as a software developer. And seemingly the fact CS started it's origins as a mod of Half-Life. As far as this corperation is concerned, it was just protecting it's billion dollar I.P.

"Deathmatch mode now allows unbalanced teams." Speaking of deathmatch!

170 days since season two's launch and season three is here. The incendiary gernade gets a slight buff, MP9 gets a small nerf. Along with CT's getting a 50 dollar reward for each T killed. Trade Protected Items are now apart of the steam trading ecosystem, with CS2 as the testbed. Essentially, any traded CS2 items you send to a player can be "reversed" within seven days of the trade being made. It's not really clear why it took so long for Valve to release this kind of change for Steam. And it's still not free from abuse, as you could trade for a skin and the seller see the price of the skin go up and reverse the trade. But this is much preferable than the previous way of trading. And as a positive from me, the amount of scam bots that have been adding me since this update as decreased dramatically... Or maybe it's just I've already blocked hundreads of them.

AnimGraph 2 for first person viewmodel animations are now out! This better animation system actually takes less processing power for the server to process. Despite this update being mainly for maintence, there's actually some good stuff here.

This update introduces the Genesis Terminal, it's like a CS2 case... Except more regulator friendly... And the red's cost hundreads of dollars? Like actual hundreads of dollars in the steam wallet. And the whole terminal is just so much slower to use than a case. And map scripting finally makes a comeback! Back in CS:GO it was called "v-script".

Remember all those people who got trade banned from exploiting the armory pass? Well they're now unbanned after waiting a whole year, And still act as if they deserve to live.Well there's some more skins because why not? And some half-decent community maps, along with more map scripting.

Transit gets removed.

It's been 623 days since the Arms Race update and finally a second game mode arrives. Re-takes the literal game mode in it's name is based soley around CT's regaining control of the bomb site. A game mode you'll always end up playing, unless you save that round. There's not much else to say for this update other than some bug fixes, community maps updates, and the market cap of skins losing 1 billion dollars in the span of 17 hours. Yeah, this update will forever live in infamy for any CS player with either a glove, a knife or even red tier skins. It's a shame that I don't have all the media that got produced at this time. But This one is a good Hallmark.

A blog post from Valve gives an update about workshop item submissions for CS2. For the entirery of CS:GO the way Skin, Sticker, and map creators were paid by Valve was a royalty system. For skins it's a 7% revenue cut and so 7% divded by 17 skins in the case for a 2.50 case key per purchase. And it's safe to say these skins creators earn a passive income of hundreads to thousands of dollars every month. This new optional revenue sharing term removes the royalty system, in favor of a one time payment of thousands of dollars. This change of revenue sharing goes back to Valves gradual discontinuation of cases. And there will come a time in the not so near furture where the supply of cases will be small. And so the passive income of these skin creators will get smaller and smaller. A lot of the consensus from workshop creators towards this new one time payment system is mostly negative.

Valve quietly ends the "Rare drop pool" from the weekly drops.

The fourth season of Premier was set to launch on January 19th. The 19th came and went and nothing happened, so did the 20th. But on the 21st it finally came out.

The New York Attorney General "Letitia James" sues Valve for promoting illedal gambling through video games.