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PC Gamer’s Ted Litchfield expressed hope in January that there might be room for Valve to reconsider its rejection of Classic Offensive, an eight-years-in-the-making mod for Counter Strike: Global Offensive that aims to recreate the experience of Counter-Strike 1.6. And it’s a good day for Ted, because an update posted today on X says Valve has made contact with the team over its “concerns” the mod may violate Steam guidelines.
Classic Offensive mod team leader ZooL had been experimenting with Counter-Strike mods as far back as 2015: We first reported on Classic Offensive in 2016, and it was approved by Steam’s defunct Greenlight program in 2017.
Work has been continuing since, with the goal of taking the game back to something more akin to the GoldSrc era of Counter-Strike, sexed up with modern amenities and stripped of the weight of cosmetics and microtransactions that dominate CS:GO in its current form.
All seemed well until January 2025, eight years after our first story about it, when the team submitted its build to Steamworks—and it was rejected without explanation via “an automated Steam support message.” The team said they didn’t know why the build was rejected, and insisted they’d followed Valve’s regulations and recommendations “to the letter.”
“Nobody at Valve told us to stop doing 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.”
It all sounds very much like Valve—algorithms and automation ruling the day—but that automation also left open the possibility that maybe things could be fixed if only the mod team could talk to a real person, which they said they’d continue trying to do. It took a couple months, but lo and behold, they did.
“We were contacted by Valve this morning,” the Classic Offensive dev team said in a new message shared on X. “They have reached out to us with concerns that our mod may no longer be compliant with their guidelines and the Steam Subscriber Agreement. In light of these concerns, we are auditing the current build of the mod to ensure nothing is in violation of those guidelines.”
So it’s not quite we’re back, but it is we’re talking, and that’s a big step in the right direction. There’s still a chance Valve will shoot the whole thing down, but the newly-opened line of communication means there’s at least an opportunity to figure things out first: Determine how the mod violates Steam’s guidelines, and what can be done about it. Maybe nothing—it’s possible the algorithms were right, and the whole thing is irretrievably sunk—but maybe something, too.
There haven’t been any further updates on either X or the Classic Offensive Discord since today’s message was posted, so there’s no timeline for how long this audit might take. But there is hope that the Classic Offensive mod will see the light one day, and that’s a lot more than we had.
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Kurt Indovina
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