Counter-Strike: Global Offensive started off as an Xbox 360 port of Counter-Strike: Source by Hidden Path Entertainment. Seeing this as an opportunity to expand the franchise, Valve turned it into an entirely new game. The game uses the latest version of the Source engine and is not built off of Counter-Strike: Source. After the success of the previous game, Valve wanted the newest game in the franchise to cater to both the casual and competitive community by including a matchmaking system as well as support for dedicated servers. Valve announced the beta would begin in October, but after receiving feedback from professional players who had been invited to playtest earlier versions of the beta, Valve decided to delay the beta. After addressing the majority of the issues the closed beta started on November 30, 2011.
- Continued support
Since the beta ended, Hidden Path Entertainment have stopped its share of the development and Valve has taken over and provided countless updates to the game for everything from bug fixes and gameplay adjustments to new official content. Some important updates include: - Carrying a hostage instead of leading them. - Continuous tweaking of weapons and maps to "balance" gameplay. - Multiple weapon cases containing weapon skins and stickers to customize weapons. - Additional weapons (for exaple M4A1-S and the USP-S). - "Operation Payback" - Introduced on April 25, 2013. The first "DLC Patch" introducing new official and made by community content. - "The Arms Deal" update - Released on August 14th, 2013 bringing weapon skins which were aviable to drop from containers (+keys to open them) and timed drops. "The Arms Deal" update made the whole game much more popular because of collectors content. - "Operation Bravo" - The second operation released on September 19, 2013. Included new community created maps available for casual/competitive/deathmatch scenarios. It also included a operation specific weapon case and collection. - Two maps: Cobble and Overpass were added on December 13, 2013. - "The Winter Offensive" update - Added on December 18, 2013 introducing gifting option, the first community created weapon skins in separate case, and the eSports 2013 Winter Case as a official support for going eSport events. - "Operation Phoenix" - The third operation released on February 20, 2014. The operation brought back 8 top voted community maps from the previous operations into the official matchmaking and released another case. - "Operation Breakout" - The fourth operation released on July 1, 2014. The operation included 6 new community maps as well as its own weapon case. The operation also introduced the Operation Journal to record progress during the operation. Players were also able to fulfill special "missions" allowing the players to receive a special reward from one of three new weapon skin collections by completing special tasks.
