An ambitious Counter-Strike mod emulating the OG 1.6 experience in Global Offensive has been rejected by Valve after 8 years of development.
The creators of the long-in-development Classic Offensive mod for Counter-Strike: Global Offensive shared on Twitter that its release on Steam was rejected and its app closed after eight years of development. I’ve submitted a request for comment from Valve and will update this story if I hear back, but the failure may be due to Source engine workarounds the team used when creating the mod.
In a post dated December 29, the Classic Offensive team wrote that they submitted a build of the mod for review in October and are still waiting to hear back from Steamworks, despite the typical turnaround time being three to five business days. On January 11, the Classic Offensive team shared a detailed message stating that Valve had “shut down our app without explanation. This is devastating because we have been working on the project for almost eight years.”
Classic Offensive was greenlighted by Steam’s now-defunct Greenlight program in 2017, with mod team leader ZooL indicating that he was experimenting with CSGO modding back in 2015 – we first reported on the project back in 2016. Classic Offensive was positioned as a sort of CS 1.6 revival, built on the latest version of the Source engine—different versions of Counter-Strike share similar divisive allegiance to the various Super Smash Bros. games—with graphics, sound effects, animations and mechanics that are increasingly closer to the era GoldSrc in Counter-Strike, but with modern production values and features added. The creators of Classic Offensive also positioned it as a cleaner, more stripped-down alternative to the cosmetic and microtransaction-heavy CSGO.
The Classic Offensive team stated that they did not use the leaked engine source code, despite having the option to do so, to maintain integrity. The Classic Offensive team also said that they had contacted Valve developers who were interested in the project, and that they had responded to requests from Valve’s legal team, such as removing the word “Counter-Strike” from the project’s name.
“No one at Valve has told us to stop what we’ve been doing all these years, no formal requests, but at this point this feels like an even worse form of cease and desist,” Classic Offensive said in a statement. “Many people at Valve know about our and many other projects, but have refused to communicate with them since the end of 2020. We feel like we were treated unfairly and were blinded by our passion for the game, as many projects have been before.
“We now feel the need to tell any modding team associated with Valve projects to reconsider what they’re doing if their only method of release is through Steam, especially multiplayer mods, as they will likely be rejected the same way we were. We don’t think that’s the case. our case is generally isolated.”
The hard work of the Classic Offensive team being allowed to continue until the last second before being rejected is devastating and a situation that could have been improved with clearer communication from Valve, be it positive or negative. At the same time, we could understand what made Steamworks reject the mod. Users SlayerN and abyssalsolitude on Reddit r/pcgaming and r/games respectively pointed to posts from the Classic Offensive team back in 2022.
“Following (Valve’s) update on modding and license access,” Classic Offensive said in a June 4, 2022 tweet, “it is now abundantly clear that our only solutions are to either cancel the project or hack core files with every security update to fix our issues that are breaking mods.” In a follow-up tweet, the Classic Offensive team wrote: “There is no code leak. We are using the 2020 build, which has security vulnerabilities and a hacked dedicated server so that you can even play online while working inside.”
In a ModDB update around the same time, the team wrote: “When we committed to Steam Greenlight in 2017, we had several email conversations with Valve and CS:GO developers in which we had to explain the problems we were having with modding CS:GO and how we can fix them. Unfortunately, two years later we asked about obtaining a license to access their source code, but did not receive a positive response.”
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Without this license and access to the CSGO source code, the mod would not be able to support online play due to CSGO security updates. “The only solution is to fix the game yourself using plugins/binary patches, wait for them to fix it (it’s been 6 years), or release an insecure version that doesn’t have these problems (too old and risky),” the team wrote.
“As you might have guessed, we got tired of sending them emails and have taken the remediation route to continue our work, which is extremely complex and requires us to be careful in how we do it,” the Classic Offensive team wrote. “For legal reasons, we cannot use the leaked source code, which means we will have to patch existing binaries released by the latest CS:GO security patches.”
I sympathize with the team at Classic Offensive: the project is a long-running non-profit labor of love that has eaten up its creators’ free time for much of the last decade. Faced with the choice of abandoning 6 years of work on a largely unmodding-friendly game, or rolling the dice on “hacking core files with every security update”, the route they took makes sense, especially in the absence of a clear word from Valve. Much of the company’s mystique stems from its “black box,” an inscrutable pint-sized powerhouse that has remade computer games. The dark side of this can be seen in examples of uneven moderation and approval of games on Steam, complaints from former employees about the loose internal structure, and everything that happened last summer with Deadlock.
At the same time, while Valve management does not directly prohibit the distribution of games and mods on the Source engine, Classic Offensive’s special digital forests surround Global Offensive, a game that Valve has discontinued and does not support, whether you agree with this decision or not. —I think this is a reasonable thing that a company should be wary of. Meanwhile, Steamworks’ move away from Classic Offensive doesn’t seem to be entirely unexpected: the issue of licensing has been a recurring topic in Classic Offensive’s development updates. However, it looks like there’s room for this story to evolve, and I hope Valve reconsiders their decision or finds a way to accommodate Classic Offensive.