We've been hearing rumours about Valve working on a new version of Counter-Strike for years. As far back as 2017, we've been hearing plans to bring CSGO to the Source 2 engine, and other rumours have claimed that an entirely new Counter-Strike game is being made. The latest Counter-Strike leak comes from the most unlikely place – Nvidia.
Nvidia has been tied to a few accurate video game leaks in recent years, in part due to a major GeForce Now database leak, which revealed a ton of in-development projects at studios across the industry. This week's leak is a little different. Essentially, in the latest Nvidia drivers, new profiles have been added for something called ‘csgo2.exe' and ‘cs2.exe', both are labelled as Counter-strike 2 in the menus, as you can see in the tweet below:
Something weird just happened. Latest NVIDIA drivers introduced support for unknown app executables called "csgos2.exe" and "cs2.exe". Why project is called Counter-Strike 2 and what are you cooking @csgo? https://t.co/U9YKlAjwgy pic.twitter.com/PU8Op9uGLq
— Gabe Follower (@gabefollower) March 1, 2023
Gabe Follower did a little more digging, finding that these are new additions in the latest driver and did not appear in other driver versions in recent months.
Now it is important to note that this doesn't necessarily confirm anything as Valve is a studio notorious for working on many prototypes and even complete versions of games, and then changing their minds and not shipping anything. With that in mind, this could just be another case of Valve experimenting with an idea.
Rumours of a Source 2 version of CS:GO have been persisting for years and it would make sense for Valve to bring one of its flagship games over to its latest engine. With that said, CS:GO is currently undergoing a random resurgence, setting new player count records more than a decade on from its release, so Valve isn't going to be in any rush to push out something new.
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KitGuru Says: Counter-strike was the game that really got me into PC gaming and shooters as a whole. It would be awesome to see a new game at some point and it does seem like Valve is working on one, or at the very least, a Source 2 refresh for CS:GO as it currently exists. Whether or not it ever sees the light of day is another story.