DirectX 9 and 32-bit PC support also canned
Are you a Mac player who’s been hungrily looking forward to the eventual Mac port ofCounter-Strike 2, released last month, after sinking many hours and much pocket money into the precedingCounter-Strike: Global Offensive? Fantastic news, it’s been binned off! In the course of making what they’re calling “the largest technical leap in CS history”, Valve have decided to discontinue support for MacOS. They’re also doing away with support for older PCs, including DirectX 9 and 32-bit operating systems - in future, the game will be exclusive to 64-bit Windows and Linux systems.
If you’re a Mac user, meanwhile, you can get a refund providing most of your Global Offensive playtime was on macOS (Valve don’t give an exact percentage of play hours), and you played Global Offensive on a Mac between 22nd March and 27th September, regardless of when you bought the upgrade.
Valve’s statement adds that players using DirectX 9, 32-bit operating systems or macOS “represented less than one percent of active CS:GO players”. Dumping these platforms makes sense from that perspective, but it’s a bitter pill to swallow for the Macintoshers amongst us or those who, for whatever reason, play on very old PCs. One bizarre outcome of this development is that the much-honed and expanded Counter-Strike: Global Offensive has sort of risen from the dead, which might interestthe legions of players who think Counter-Strike 2 isn’t a patch on the old warhorse. (Technically, all players canstill access CS:GOat the moment by picking certain beta options, but it only gives you the option of playing private matches against bots.)
“Right now CS2 is a great iterative update to a tried and true formula… that’s missing an awful lot of fan favourite stuff,” Ed Thorn wrote in RPS’sCounter-Strike 2 review. “Give it time, though, and I think it’s onto something pretty special.” If you’re playing, you might be interested in our guides to thebest Counter-Strike 2 settings, thebest Counter-Strike 2 crosshair codesand thebest Counter-Strike 2 console commands.
