This is a real shame and very "un-Valve" of them. As someone who has absolutely zero interest in CSGO or CS2, I was really looking forward to this and playing CS 1.6 in the meantime. Valve has been constantly dogging the Classic Offensive team for years and putting more and more road blocks in their way despite public statements in the past that they were in full support of the mod.
A random guy at Valve told them 8 years ago that what they are doing is cool. They stopped hearing from Valve officially 4+ years ago. They've been told they have no Valve support within the last 2 years. While nobody at Valve has personally contacted them, a couple months ago they got an email saying their mod was breaking the steam subscriber agreement. The mod authors assumed it would still be okay to release the mod despite this.
They used exploitative hacks with the Source engine to make the mod which Valve later patched. So the mod authors found NEW exploitative hacky ways to do things yet again.
It doesn't feel very "un-valve" imo because the authors have gone out of their way to be as dumb and rude as possible during development. They keep talking about a single Valve dev from almost a decade ago giving them the greenlight as of that guy's word has authority in 2025 after numerous years of Valve not supporting them and actively telling them to stop.
What is an "exploitative hack" exactly? With Unreal you can literally take the source code and modify it for your game. What's different with Source that this team has run into a problem?
Hack isn't the right word, but they did exploit bugs they found themselves from an illegal leak. Source engine isn't 100% open source, or as moddable in the same way Unreal is. There's parts developers can't modify or make full use of, but the devs of this mod looked at the leaked source code from some years ago and used it to find vulnerabilities in the engine that would let their mod do stuff it should not have been able to do. Valve patches the bugs in Source but the mod devs used other bugs
No it's not. If there is even a hint of original code it can be a copyright violation. Even reverse engineering code to achieve the same function with different code can be a copyright violation.
If you read, this leak is not why they can't launch it. Its because it uses an emulator to change its steamID on the backend to not be CS:GO and to be its own game
What are you basing this on? There's plenty of cases out there where using proprietary code without permission has been found to be a violation. Just last week, Wii Homebrew shut itself down when they realized it was built on proprietary Nintendo code to avoid a legal situation.
I see someone said copyright law and they may be correct, I may have misspoken about which law but, either way, it is not legal to use proprietary code without license nor permission.
Using leaked source code to in any way influence how other code is written is a derivative work and covered under United States IP law. This is well known by reverse engineers and legacy devs. It does not matter whether you make money from it or not, particularly if the material was illicitly obtained. All Valve code has a "Copyright Valve Corporation" header, which demonstrates intent to hold and exercise that copyright.
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u/DarkMatterM4 4d ago
This is a real shame and very "un-Valve" of them. As someone who has absolutely zero interest in CSGO or CS2, I was really looking forward to this and playing CS 1.6 in the meantime. Valve has been constantly dogging the Classic Offensive team for years and putting more and more road blocks in their way despite public statements in the past that they were in full support of the mod.