Everyone just loves untested forced updates. /s
It has nothing to do with consumer choice. It has to do with maintaining the servers and infrastructure to run these games. Patching and updating one game is way easier than doing it for multiple games. It’s the same thing that they did when CS went from a mod to a standalone game on Steam. Everyone was on the same version and, despite some people begrudgingly getting dragged along, was really what turned CS into the behemoth it was.
It’s about forcing everyone to switch
You can still play CS 1.6, you don’t even need clouds for that one. You can play CS source. In this case they wanted to carry the momentum live the good little service game that they are. Technical reasons are superficial smokescreens.
They know every time they made a release some people didn’t want to switch and stayed behind.
Yes, it is about forcing everyone to switch and I’m sorry but you sound completely ignorant of what goes into a game like CS that is used in professional esports. CS1.6 and CS:Source are locked codebases. There are no official servers for them. They are standalone server games only. They are not getting updates unless there are some major exploits. CS:GO is the official, active codebase and its the same codebase as CS2, upgraded to Source2.
It has nothing to do “clouds” (a term you’re not even using correctly) and technical reasons are the entirety of the reasons. They’re not smokescreens. They are exactly why they did what they did - to maintain 1 active codebase that everyone playing uses. That’s it. There’s no mystery or conspiracy.
It’s the same thing that they did when CS went from a mod to a standalone game on Steam.
No it isn’t. Valve did not make CS 1.6, CS 1.6 was a user-created mod. Valve did then hire the mod makers to help make the Source engine (just like DICE hired the Desert Combat modders to make Battlefield 2), but Valve had no involvement with CS in its inception, nor its maintenance pre-Source. Hell, both CS 1.6 and CS:Source primarily ran on user servers, so there wasn’t even any significant upkeep costs.
CS 1.6 pre-dates Steam. CS:S was Valve, but both games did not have any servers or infrastructure to manage, beyond a simple exchange server that catalogued everyone’s game servers (also VAC, if the server host enabled it). It’s CS:GO that started having a big back end. Your point is valid, but only for CS:GO.
It’s kind of surprising how so many people in here have the history muddled.
I don’t have anything mixed up and you’re not right. The mod was only pre-Valve when it was still in beta. They hired Minh right around Beta 5. When Valve made CS 1.0 (way before CS 1.6) part of the official Valve catalog, they set up official servers but you could still set up community servers. When Steam came out, they required that it be run through Steam which forced everyone onto the same version of both the client and the server. You could still spin up your own server using an older version but you the game wouldn’t be listed in the game’s browser. You had to use Gamespy or HLServerWatch.
Steam forced everyone to update. It’s not 100% analogous to this situation but going from mod to standalone fractured the playerbase and codebase. This was clearly a move to prevent that from happening again. I’m indifferent to it but obviously everyone isn’t.
