It looks like the release date for Counter-Strike 2 finally got revealed by Valve. Thanks to a very suspicious post on Twitter, there is no doubt, the game will release next week.
Counter-Strike 2 is generating immense anticipation as a first-person shooter. Valve's new game will likely enjoy widespread popularity upon launch, especially considering that Counter Strike: Global Offensive still boasts over a million active players daily.
Until now, Valve stated it will be released “during the summer”, maybe they didn't check their calendars, because we're in mid-September now.
CS2 Release Date Revealed
Valve finally broke the silence, by posting a highly suspicious question on Twitter.
What are you doing next Wednesday?
— CS2 (@CounterStrike) September 20, 2023
It looks like Valve now officially announced the highly anticipated release of Counter-Strike 2, and it's set to launch on September 27.
A recent leak by ThourCS already gave us a little bit of insight into when the game will be published. ThourCS found some information in the game code about seasonal leaderboards. That suggests that CS2 will have a leaderboard ranking for the top players, like Valorant has.
In the source code of the game, ThourCS found some dates linked to the seasons. It looked like the first official season after the limited test phase (just a reminder, we're currently in this phase) would start on September 23 and would last for three months till December 22.
This obviously didn't quite come to pass, as it now looks like Counter-Strike 2 will release a few days later, on September 27. We still expect this first season to launch on that day as well, or a few days afterward at the latest.
CS2 - Premier Mode Leaderboards
— ThourCS (@ThourCS) August 7, 2023
In the upcoming Premier Mode, the leaderboard will be classified into 4 categories:
Global
Region (North America)
Country (United States)
Friends
For now, 4 seasons are added to the Leaderboard Menu and they are -
Limited Test /... pic.twitter.com/Y4AWTQUyy2
It is likely, that Counter Strike 2 won't feature ranked matchmaking for the first days or weeks, since players need to get used to the new game. So we think CS2 will release in early September.
For the 20th birthday of Steam – which is owned by Valve – we received a little historical rundown, that contained some extra information. In their blog post they stated:
The year isn’t quite over but so far we’ve released a huge Steam Client update, Counter-Strike 2
entered into beta (and launches soon) [...]
The game “launches soon” according to Valve. That's one step closer to the official information we had previously, which only contained the information “coming in summer”. It sounds like a small detail for most people, but for the CS die-hards it's a big thing. Valve is pretty conservative when it comes to giving out information on releases.
While we don't know exactly, when CS2 will release, Valve has added all maps that were available in the CS2 limited test so far into one Casual playlist. The limited test has been widened out and a lot of players now have access to it. This and the fact that all game modes are also available for offline matches now, hints at CS2 being basically done and ready for release, with just a small handful of bugs Valve wants to get rid of.
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What do you think about this change for CS2?