Despite a brief blip of hope that a way forward may be found, the ambitious Counter-Strike mod Classic Offensive has been officially cancelled.
“After eight years of development, and despite being officially Greenlit by Valve in 2017, we are devastated to announce the cancellation of Classic Offensive,” the development team wrote in a message posted to Reddit. “This decision follows abrupt actions by Valve that prevent us from releasing or continuing development on the project.”
Initial work on Classic Offensive, an effort to recreate the classic Counter-Strike 1.6 experience in Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, began way back in 2015: We first reported on it in 2016, and it got the official go-ahead from Valve in 2017 in the old Steam Greenlight program.
All seemed well until January 2025, when the team announced that Valve had “retired” the mod—removed it from Steam, basically—without warning or explanation. Developers said at the time that the takedown felt worse than a conventional cease-and-desist order because they’d been allowed to work on the mod right up until it was ready for release, with no indication of trouble, and even after the mod was taken down they weren’t told why.
Following that, the Classic Offensive team decided to release the mod via ModDB instead, which is apparently what prompted Valve to reach out in March 2025. The simple fact that the two sides were talking seemed like a good sign, but it went nowhere: Valve informed the team that “releasing Classic Offensive would be distributing ‘derivative content’ based on [Valve’s] intellectual property, which is not permitted under the Steam Subscriber Agreement.”
The mod team is clearly (and understandably) not happy about how this has all worked out, saying Valve’s position on Classic Offensive represents a sharp turn away from “three decades of modding tradition that shaped many of their successful games”—not to mention the fact that Classic Offensive was at one point officially approved by Valve.
“This situation has implications far beyond our project, raising serious concerns for the future of modding within Valve’s ecosystem,” the team wrote.
“Modders should reconsider how they see Valve: A company that benefits from community creativity while being able to shut down years of work without warning, despite going through their defined process which they can drastically change at any time.”
That’s harsh and perhaps a little overstated, but fair play to the Classic Offensive team, I think a little bitterness is warranted here. Not that anything shady or underhanded has happened, and Valve is well within its rights to protect its property as it sees fit, but eight years is a long haul and to have it shut down mere hours before release has to be a heartbreaker.
One rather persistent rumour for what’s happened is that Classic Offensive was using Valve’s own leaked code, which would at least make Valve’s stance a little more understandable. But the team vehemently denies this in the project’s FAQ:
“No, Classic Offensive does not use any leaked code and never has,” reads the FAQ. “We have built it on top of the latest CS:GO release through file editing and scripting, similarly to Portal 2 mods without a license. This seems to be a recurring rumor spread by either misinformed or purely malicious individuals that are trying to discredit our work.”
The dev team has now launched a website as classic-offensive.net, which includes the FAQ noted above as well as a timeline of events, contributor credits, and media from the mod. “We are immensely grateful for the incredible support, enthusiasm, and patience shown by the community throughout Classic Offensive’s support,” the team wrote. “Thank you for believing in our project.”
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