Valve has issued a cease and desist order to the team behind the Counter-Strike: Global Offensive mod, Classic Offensive, after having previously approved the mod 8 years prior.
In a lengthy statement published to the mod team's official X account, the Classic Offensive team warns mod creators that they "should reconsider how they see Valve: a company that benefits from community creativity while being able to shut down years of work without warning, despite going through their defined process which they can drastically change at any time."
Valve gave the project the green light in 2017, according to a timeline the Classic Offensive mod team has created on their website. After years of little to no communication from Valve, in January 2025, the Classic Offensive app was rejected by Valve with the only explanation being "we found that your app is not a good fit for Steam."
After that, the team worked to try and find out what Valve meant by Classic Offensive not being a good fit, reaching out to Valve to no avail. The cease and desist order came through just hours before the team intended to update the mod through ModDB.
"As we prepared to update via ModDB instead," the Classic Offensive team's statement reads, "we received a cease and desist notification from Valve's socials just hours before launch. In follow-up communications, they clarified that releasing Classic Offensive would be distributing 'derivative content' based on their intellectual property, which is not permitted under the Steam Subscriber Agreement."
The statement goes on to call out the narrowing conditions for what mods based on Valve's games are allowed and how, in the view of the Classic Offensive team, the company's current interpretations of what's allowed go against the culture around modding that Valve has benefited from for years and Valve's approval of the project in 2017.
It's unfortunate for the mod team and those who were looking forward to Classic Offensive that Valve has seemingly changed its mind about what it wants to allow at the last minute, and it also puts into question other mods, particularly the recently revealed CS: GO Legacy project.
