The little CSGO team at Valve work on making CSGO the best game everyday. It’s their job to. With that said.. Valve is the platform business. It’s biggest and most important product is Steam. To make Steam attractive, to encourage adoption and retention of game developers Valve release many products that tie games to Steam. CSGO exists, for the larger company, purely to advertise those Steam features:
- Making a competitive game? We offer a matchmaking service using Glicko. Look at how matchmaking increases retention rates and players invest to make it to the top.
- Worried about cheaters using free 2 play accounts? We’ve got Trustfactor spanning multiple games so we can look at a gamer’s history to see if they’re likely to cheat.
- Need anti-cheat? VAC bans thousands of CS players and you can enable it with 2 shakes of a lambs tail
- AI Anticheat? Look at how CSGO detects and bans aimbots.
- Want an overlay, with web browser, chat and want your gamers to share game screenshots on the community? Just hit F12 on any Steam game and get it free!
- That’s not all. We got desktop SDK, Valve Index SDK for VR games and a host of other services you might want to enjoy.
- Community market? Check out Counterstrikes loot boxes, even operating in France (with a novel legal interpretations)!
- Look at Counterstrike running on a “steam deck”. Pointless but respectable from a technical standpoint none the less.
- Want the community to build your product for you? How about Steam Workshop. Our millions of Counterstrike users are upvoting the same poorly designed aim-maps for decades.
- Want to target the Esports arena? We’re the experts with Counterstrike. Check out Steam TV where gamers watch streams together and we collect the metrics and sell them back to you like Adsense for your game.
- Worried about going free 2 play? We did it with Counterstrike.
We love and are invested in Counterstrike and I certainly believe the devs are too. CSGO has to dance to the tune of those selling Steam as a platform. Those below Gaben who want to milk the product and use it as an advertising tool for the rest of Steam. That’s why CSGO is getting Steam deck support even though we all know a controller isn’t as good as a mouse. Ho hum, tis the world of business.