Counter-Strike: Global Offensive is back: 3 years after it was muscled out by Counter-Strike 2, CS:GO has its own Steam page again and has powered its way back onto Steam’s most-played chart

I have no idea what to make of this, but more than two years after it was folded into Counter-Strike 2, Counter-Strike: Global Offensive is back on Steam.

CS:GO was never fully scrubbed out of existence: Committed diehards could continue accessing the OG GO through a CS2 beta build, unceremoniously named “csgo_demo_viewer.” Online matchmaking was disabled, though, so play was restricted to matches with bots.

Now, for some reason, CS:GO has its own standalone Steam page again, although it’s somewhat limited too. It’s unlisted, meaning it won’t appear in Steam searches. (Luckily for you, the direct link is right there, and web searches will get you there too.) There’s also still no matchmaking, which is not convenient, but you can still do it old-school through Steam’s server browser by manually joining community servers—and yes, there are still plenty of them up and running.

Why CS:GO has suddenly been broken out again is anyone’s guess right now, but there’s some real excitement about the development on the Global Offensive subreddit. Why would Valve go to this trouble, the thinking goes, unless it was planning to do something more with it down the road? It’s not as though Valve needs to rescue CS2, which remains very firmly atop Steam’s most-played chart.

It’s arguable that this isn’t just returning things to the way they were, but to the way they should be. PC Gamer’s CS:Guy Rich Stanton said in 2023 that it was “messed up and weird” that Valve opted to bury CS:GO, saying its deep roots and durability make it more meaningful to players than most games: “Even if every single aspect of CS2 was an improvement over CS:GO, and that is far from a given, it cannot on day one replace that connection with longstanding players.”

Even unlisted, letting players actually play CS:GO online again instead of just horsing around with bots is a pretty big deal. And there’s clearly still an appetite for the old boy. The newly accessible CS:GO has powered its way into the top 20 on that list with, as I write this, more than 61,000 concurrent players, an unmistakable message to Valve that there’s room in this world for both CS2 and CS:GO.