After being in development for almost eight years, a Counter-Strike Global Offensive mod that aimed to restore "the community aspects and aesthetics" of Counter-Strike 1.6 has reportedly been "retired" by Steam "without any reason" given. This is despite the fact that the mod team had apparently previously contacted Valve's legal team to iron out potential issues.
Per its old Steam page, the Classic Offensive mod aimed to "recreate the 1.6 vibe" in CS:GO, but in a new statement shared on Twitter, the team says that it "received an automated Steam Support message" about the app's retirement after it submitted its build to Steamworks. "This is devastating as we've worked on the project for almost eight years now," it states.
"We do not understand what happened, we went through Steam Greenlight back in 2017, talked to legal to know if this was possible for us to release on Steam," it continues. "We even discussed with some of the developers on different Valve projects, and they have been very cooperative in helping us figure out the means of release back then."
The team claims that it followed mod release guidelines and "requirements and recommendations to the letter," which it says was "sometimes even to the detriment of the quality of the mod." It adds, "We feel like we were treated unfairly and have been blinded by our own passion for the game, as many other projects did before."
pic.twitter.com/7Z07uD8MqqJanuary 11, 2025
On Twitter, the dev who started the creation of Classic Offensive in the first place, @ZooL_Smith, has given a few more details on the situation. After the project "reached top position on Greenlight," Steam's now defunct program that let the community have a voice on what could come to the platform, "Valve started contacting us, specifically people from their legal team, where they started looking into the project and potential issues for being added to Steam." In Classic Offensive's case, that included its original name (once Counter-Strike: Classic Offensive), as well as mentions of other Valve IP in its maps, which it dealt with.
Back to the present, and the team is faced with a response claiming that the mod is "not a good fit for Steam" after apparently waiting since November for an "additional review" of the mod. What's more, the response states that the app "cannot be reused." One ray of hope remains as @ZooL_Smith says other modders have previously received the same message and "sometimes it's just a mistake Steamworks employees do, and it can be reverted."
Hopefully for the Classic Offensive team, that can happen here – @ZooL_Smith says "It's awful, and this is why I hope nobody else should get in this situation." An old version of the mod is still available on ModDB, but notably isn't the final product that the team had spent so much time on.
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