On 24 August 1996, Gabe Newell and Mike Harrington walked out of Microsoft and registered a studio of their own. No shipped game to their name, no engine, no plan that reached any further than the first project.Thirty years later their launcher sits on almost every gaming PC on the planet, and the rest of us argue about every decision the company makes. Valve has released maybe two dozen games

Skins in your inventory. Stickers on your gun. A line in the HLTV ranking. Your own agent in matchmaking. Free entry to the game itself. All of it feels like the baseline Counter-Strike has always run on. None of it existed fourteen years ago.Valve released Counter-Strike: Global Offensive on 21 August 2012, and the reception was frosty. Half the scene was still on 1.6, the other half on Source, and

The skin market has been sliding for months now, and every player ends up asking the same question: what do you actually play with? Staring at default models after a few years in the game gets depressing fast, and buying anything expensive right now is a genuinely frightening proposition.So we decided to solve the problem outright. We put together a complete set — pistols, rifles, an AWP, a MAC-10 and

Paris has finished sorting the contenders from the passengers. Of the dozens of teams that flew in for Esports World Cup 2026, only sixteen are still standing, and even a generous slot count couldn't keep the surprises out: for a handful of the biggest names here, this tournament is going nowhere near the way they drew it up.We're breaking down every round-of-16 tie below, and at the end we've put