On Friday, October 16, Deadlock added a new hero — Violet, a painter. Fifty minutes later, 303,347 people were in the game. That's a new all-time peak, and for a game still in closed beta, it's a ridiculous number. A week earlier, Deadlock had already passed Team Fortress 2's best-ever player count. Among Valve games, only CS2 and Dota 2 have higher peaks now. And this is a game that

When Valve let players put stickers on the bomb, the community turned the C4 into a brand-new canvas within days, and we rounded up the best early work back then. Crafters haven't slowed down since. They've moved past simply dressing up the keypad and started working the screen, building full-on concepts across the whole package. The brick nobody used to look at twice is now a real part of your

Late on September 22, Valve shipped the Rush Hour update and, for the first time in CS2's three-year life, added a matchmaking mode Counter-Strike had never had before. For the first day or so, though, the community talked about it far less than about chickens: eggs and feed in the weekly drop quickly took over the conversation. And under every Rush post, the usual joke made the rounds: instead of

You die early in the round, the camera jumps to a teammate, and for a second you forget about the game entirely. He’s holding a skin you last saw while bored-scrolling the market. One question pops into your head: “Wait, who actually plays with this?” The answer is right there — alive, perfectly content, and running onto the site.The skin meta plays by the same rules as the in-game meta: