While it’s undeniable that CS2’s launch had garnered an unprecedented amount of hype, Valve did not bother following up on it just as much. With meaningful patches being a rare sight to see, players are not happy with the lackluster state of the game. Even professional players have recently started calling out Valve’s treatment of Counter-Strike’s newest instalment, with G2 NiKo saying the following on Blast.TV: “I’m pretty disappointed in the development in CS2. It’s pretty sad that with a new game we have made a step back instead of two steps forward. It has been a year now without major improvements.”
What did TenZ say?
Apart from currently active professional CS2 players, another prominent figure has recently chimed in to give his two cents on the situation - TenZ. TenZ is a former CS:GO professional player who made the switch to VALORANT when it launched, propelling himself into a successful professional career with Sentinels. He competed in the VALORANT circuit for three years before recently announcing his retirement following the 2024 season. He now has a successful career in content creation and streams to thousands of viewers on Twitch.
TenZ’s audience love to seek out his opinions on different video games, and recently, one such viewer asked for his thoughts on CS2 - and TenZ went off: “It was just mainly porting it to the Source 2 engine. But the other reason is so that they can just do it and say that they’ve done some stuff and then work fully on Deadlock and release two full patches filled with content. New characters, new jungle camps, new items and everything, new graphics, every two weeks. But, happy birthday Counter-Strike, you didn’t get anything. Counter-Strike to Valve was like its f****** adopted child. And [Team Fortress 2] is like the cousin, I guess, or something, I don’t know. TF2 also. I think Valve is giving the TF2 treatment to CS right now.”
TenZ also pointed out a potential reason for such a disparity as Valve’s president and co-founder Gabe Newell, has displayed clear signs of being much more interested in MOBA games than FPS games. According to TenZ, he has never turned up to a single Counter-Strike major but frequently visits Dota 2 tournaments every year. Hence, given that Deadlock is a hero-shooter MOBA, it’s likely that Gabe Newell is more invested in making it a success than give CS2 the treatment it rightfully deserves.
