COUNTER-STR IKE : GLOBAL OFFENS IVE
There’s no better example of Valve’s penchant for taking the long view than Counter-Strike: Global Offensive. The original Counter-Strike mod turned 20 last year, and GO itself has been running for over seven of them. And yet there’s a sense that it is only now blossoming. As we write, it’s the single biggest title on Steam, having peaked at close to a million concurrent players – an all-time record for the game, which has seen its player count climbing steadily since last August.
When it first arrived in 2012, though, many established Counter-Strike players viewed CS:GO as another unworthy successor to the original, following in the footsteps of CS: Source and the now-almostcompletely-erased-from-series-history Condition Zero. The problem is, when you’ve spent years learning every frame of a reload, every pixel of recoil, the hard reboot of a sequel isn’t necessarily welcome. Many in the competitive scene clung to Counter-Strike 1.6, the game’s final major update from 2003.
As late as mid-2013, GO was being consistently outperformed by this version of the game (and by Source, which by then had found its own audience). Valve gradually turned things around – with various gameplay tweaks, with its first sponsorship of a Major Championship and with the addition of the weapon skins that would become GO’s currency. And now? Well. “We’ve doubled our player base from around 11 million to 20 million players,” technical artist
Bronwen Grimes tells us. Contributing to this explosive growth are two main factors. In September 2017, a new version of the game was released via Chinese publisher Perfect World, opening it up to a whole new market for the first time (at least officially). Then, in December 2018, CS:GO went free-to-play.
“We have three million players in China now, and are learning a bunch about what those players want and expect versus our other audiences,” Grimes says. But given that process started more than two years ago, why is CS:GO only now hitting its peak? “It wasn’t like we shipped in China, flipped some switch and a bunch of people showed up. We shipped in China, and then we had to go to work,” designer
Gautam Babbar says. “We had to remove a bunch of barriers for Chinese users that were getting in the way of them enjoying this game, and that’s taken time.”
These include meeting server demand, ensuring they’ve got the infrastructure in place as close to players as possible, and using machine learning to improve matchmaking so that new players aren’t being dashed against the rocks of CS:GO veterans. More notable, though, are the changes made ahead of launch – due to Chinese censorship regulations, red blood is banned, and certain flags and logos (including a hammer and sickle) have been stripped out of its maps. And then there’s the single biggest change of all: dropping the price of entry completely, at least for those willing to verify their identity with an AliPay account. It’s a measure intended to discourage banned players from simply making a new account and getting right back to whatever it was that got them kicked out in the first place.
In the rest of the world, though, the now free-toplay game doesn’t have that same barrier to entry. Players need to link a public Steam account, but that’s not enough to dissuade hardened cheaters, abusers and even fraudsters. “As you grow, the problems grow in scale,” Babbar says – he’s speaking more broadly, but it certainly applies to the number of bad actors within the game.
The team has a variety of solutions in place. There are the old reliables: the peer-reviewed Overwatch system and Valve Anti-Cheat, which saw huge spikes in ban numbers after CS:GO went F2P – it dished out a record 600,000 bans in December 2018, then immediately smashed that record by banning another million players the following month. And Valve is increasingly turning to machine learning solutions to help weed out problems. In August 2019, it teamed up with competitive gaming platform FACEIT to help test Minerva, an AI designed to root out toxic players – within a month and a half, Minerva had issued 90,000 warnings and 20,000 bans for verbal abuse and spam – and in February the studio announced a new algorithm-driven system for automatically muting players who “receive significantly more abuse reports than other players”. CS:GO players also have the option of purchasing a Prime upgrade, which requires a phone number to register if they’re new, and will limit their matchmaking to other Prime players.
“It’s a balance,” Babbar says. “You don’t want players to feel isolated, because it’s a multiplayer game, but you also want to protect them from abuse, so we’re always trying to figure out the best tools. It’s a continual effort, and a worthwhile one.” The truth is that CS:GO will probably be eternally locked in this arms race with the darker corners of its player base, especially if it continues growing. Not that this is about to dissuade the team. Grimes cites the challenge of an ever-expanding playerbase as one of the reasons she’s stayed on the project since launch, rather than wheeling her desk elsewhere in the office, and she believes there’s still room for the game to grow. “We don’t think that everyone who would enjoy the game is currently playing,” Grimes says. “There are more people out there that should try it.”