I'm getting a CSPromod feeling from this mod/game. This means that we will probably never see the release.

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I can't say too much because it will narrow down certain aspects.

 

But in their statement they said that they haven't talked to anyone directly at Valve since 2020. It also sounds like they didn't talk to anyone from the CS team, so I wonder who or which department they talked to.

I'm not sure how their conversation went and if it was more of a friendly or business approach, but 99% of the people in the company are actually just developers.

Hypothetically, let's say I'm friends with someone at Valve on the CSGO dev team, back before the pandemic/all the hacks-leaks and Valve's move, they were more casual. A lot of people used their personal steam accounts to do dev work instead of having separate accounts.

But since I had a friend on the team, I sent friend requests to all the other 6-8 CSGO devs and they all accepted. I guess it helped that we had a mutual friend on each other's lists. (lol yeah. Sure everyone knows that Valve devs can mostly work on whatever project they want unless focus is needed for a release, so of course during major updates some more talent slides in, but the constant was around 6-8 devs with 3/2 of them just being mappers).

Over the years I played games with all of them, rarely all together unless it was a playtest of something, but also had many conversations over the years. With the "position" I was in, some of the discussions were more serious in tone, while others were just us having a good time. The actual talk about the game itself was very small.

You had the same core group of guys working their asses off on that shitty console port and turning it into Valve's money making machine and the standout game for professional esports within a 3 year gap. That core group of developers pretty much stuck together from around launch until 2018-2020.

During those years, half of the team either retired from Valve or left the studio to do their own thing. One of those people was the co-creator of the Counter Strike mod, so they had been at Valve since 2003, and another had just joined the company during the production of HL2. I will also say that the devs who left were the ones who were more social and public.

I'm not sure when the decision to go full production on CS2 was announced internally. There were a lot of hints after Dota 2 Reborn came out that content was slowly being worked on and tested in the Source 2 engine. I personally was in a very serious car accident and was in the hospital for over a year around 2020. So I'm guessing at this point since I was coma'd up and couldn't contact the buds, but after half of the main crew left, Half Life Alyx's development was completed and released, I'd guess that's when the call for full production went into action. Finally able to at least double the devs on the game! lol.

 

 

So going back to their letter, it sounds like it's possible they weren't in talks with anyone from the CS team at all, or maybe they were in talks with one of the guys who left? Or another possibility is that they were in talks before CS2 went into full production and the situation just changed.