Counter-Strike 2 has been released

Valve have officially released Counter-Strike 2 to the public as of today, September 27th. The game comes with the new Source 2 engine, which has changed a lot of aspects of the game, from graphics to how smokes behave.

With the release of CS2, it is expected that ongoing tournaments will still be using CS:GO until their conclusion, as Valve has given tournament organizers the option to conclude the events on the old engine.

Counter-Strike 2 has been long awaited by fans, ever since the first rumors started to circle around social media. It was on March 5th that Richard Lewis published a report on his Substack confirming that CS2 was "real" and "around the corner". Following that, data miners found files called "cs2.exe" in some NVIDIA driver's supported apps.

Then, on March 22nd, Valve posted three videos on YouTube showing what they had been working on during the last few years. The news created a lot of movement within the community, as there was a lot of uncertainty about the transition, even more so because Valve didn't announce a specific date for the game's release, instead, the developer ended the videos with "Coming Summer 2023". On that same day, the Limited Test also started for a few lucky players.

Just a few days later, it was announced that PGL would be organizing the first CS2 major and that 2023, CS:GO's last year, would only feature one major, the BLAST.tv Paris Major.

Since then, a lot has changed with the game, as Valve has been tinkering according to the feedback they receive from the community. Just a week ago, the official Counter-Strike Twitter account, asked the community "What are you doing next Wednesday?", teasing the release of the new title. Yesterday, the same account changed the banner to "Dawn of the final day" and, today, changed it to "Dawn of a new day."

Just a couple of hours after, the developer released the game, which is now available to download on Steam. Accounts that have bought or downloaded CS:GO have free access to CS2.