by theygamesThe team behind an incredibly ambitious Counter-Strike: Global Offensive mod claims that Valve has blocked the project from coming to Steam. The team submitted the mod for release late last year, only to be met with silence, with the project now seemingly rejected by Valve. Called Classic Offensive, the mod has been in the works since 2016 and aims to bring back “the classic feeling” from between CS 1.6 all the way up to CSGO.
“Since we submitted our build to Steamworks, we’ve received an automated Steam Support message about having retired our app without any reason explained. This is devastating as we’ve worked on the project for almost eight years now,” the CSGO Classic Offensive team writes on Twitter/X.
The team says it submitted the FPS game mod for a build review on Sunday October 6 2024, but did “not receive any ETA or response from Steamworks” afterward. This was followed by the retirement of the mod on Steam, with the team then penning this letter.
“We do not understand what happened, we went through Steam Greenlight back in 2017, and talked to legal to know if this was possible for us to release on Steam. 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. After some requested legal changes due to the use of Valve’s IP, we were off to a good start, our mod page was created on Steamworks, things were looking promising and the team was extremely motivated.”
The Classic Offensive mod has been in the works since 2016, with the game’s official ModDB page updated with progress reports over the years. The team aims to “bring back the classic feeling from CS 1.6 right into CSGO,” which means old-school weapons, sounds, stats, and physics. The CSGO mod has been available in beta on ModDB, but never fully came to Valve’s platform. Back in 2017, Classic Offensive did make it to Steam Greenlight – a program where developers paid Valve $100 to put a game idea in front of potential players, where they would vote “Yes,” “No,” or “Maybe” on it – but that’s it.
“Steamworks had requested that we finish the build before being able to release, and now that we did, we are unable to publish it,” the team continues. “Nobody at Valve told us to stop what we were doing during all those years, no sort of formal request, yet this feels like an even worse form of cease and desist at this point. Many people at Valve are aware of our and many other projects, yet have refused to communicate since late 2020. We feel like we were treated unfairly, and have been blinded by our own passion for the game, as many other projects did before.”
The Classic Offensive team then says it feels it has to tell other Valve modding projects to “reconsider what they’re doing if their sole way of releasing is through Steam,” because they might also get rejected.
“Moving forward, we’ll try to get in contact again with Valve employees, even companies related to Counter-Strike in general to try to get things moving in the right direction, in the hope this issue can be resolved.”
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