csgo
Latest
'Death Stranding' and 'Control' lead Game Awards nominees
The Game Awards takes place in less than a month and voting is now open after Geoff Keighley announced the nominees. Hideo Kojima's sprawling epic Death Stranding leads the pack with nine nominations, including game of the year, game direction, score/music, narrative and performance for both Norman Reedus and Mads Mikkelsen.
Fraud forces Valve to kill ‘CS:GO’ loot box key trading
Valve's policy of allowing Counter Strike: Global Offensive players to buy and re-sell keys to access in-game loot boxes is no more. The company has announced that the marketplace has apparently been taken over by large fraud networks as a way of laundering money. On the CS:GO blog, an unnamed staffer wrote that "nearly all key purchases that end up being traded or sold on the marketplace are believed to be fraud-sourced."
A popular immigration bill is bad news for US esports
"What makes me nervous is the fact that it just sailed through the House." Genie Doi is an immigration lawyer with Electronic Sports and Gaming Law, an esports-specific law firm in Los Angeles. She's talking about S.386, or the Fairness for High-Skilled Immigrants Act, which passed the House in July by 300 votes. Representatives even waived some of the voting rules with a process reserved to pass noncontroversial bills.
Facebook’s Level Up is available for game streamers in 21 countries
Facebook is still continuing its assault against Twitch, as the social media giant has expanded its Level Up Program to game streamers around the world, totalling 21 countries. The Level Up Program helps streamers build a community on Facebook. Streamers that are eligible can earn some extra cash through Facebook Stars -- similar to Twitch Bits -- which are virtual goods that fans can purchase to help their favorite streamers. Level Up streamers can also unlock 1080p/60fps streaming quality, customize their dashboard and get early access to beta products and features. And much like Twitch, Facebook has a partner program that can help streamers earn additional funds and have greater reach and visibility.
US and European gambling regulators may crack down on loot boxes
Gambling regulators from Europe and the US are turning up the heat on game developers over loot boxes, which some jurisdictions claim violate gambling laws. A group of 15 European agencies and the Washington State Gambling Commission agreed to work together to "address the risks created by the blurring of lines between gaming and gambling."
The next TBS esports series looks inside a major ‘CS:GO’ tournament
TBS has become an unexpected home for esports content over the last two years, though it's mostly covered Eleague, the pro gaming circuit the cable network's parent company Turner helped create. Its next show dives into the recent CS:GO pro tournament, Eleague Premier 2018, which wrapped at the end of July. While we know the results, we don't know the stories: The seven-part series follows players from eight of the top-ranked professional teams that competed, and its first hour-long episode debuts August 31st at 11PM ET/PT on TBS.
'Counter-Strike' tournaments will now stream exclusively on Facebook
Counter-Strike: Global Offensive Pro League has got a new home. Starting February 13th, the beginning of its seventh season, it'll be streamed exclusively on Facebook, along with the ESL One Dota 2 and CS:GO tournament series. ESL, the company behind the tournaments, says that full English and Portuguese coverage will include a "much more advanced" viewing experience than fans are used to, moving beyond stories, clips and select streams, thanks largely to the success of Facebook Watch.
Pro-gaming giant Fnatic is introducing eSports to CES
Sam Mathews founded Fnatic about 13 years ago, when he was just 19. Today, Fnatic is a household name for eSports fans: It's one of the most successful and prolific professional gaming franchises in the world, regularly competing at the top tier in games like League of Legends and Counter-Strike: Global Offensive. The brand has expanded past the games and into hardware, and Mathews showed up at CES this year to demo Fnatic's latest keyboards and mice, which are due to hit the market in the coming months.
'Counter-Strike' is facing a chat bot invasion
The Counter-Strike community has faced numerous challenges in the years since launch, ranging from cheating to gambling, but there's one more to add to the pile: a flood of chat bots. At least one intruder is taking advantage of a Counter-Strike: Global Offensive exploit to flood lobbies (even private ones) with text from chat bots that can't be kicked. From early indications, the attacker is trying to draw attention to security issues -- Valve supposedly doesn't care about cheaters and needs to be taught a lesson, if you believe the harasser.
Valve may be using a neural net against 'Counter-Strike' cheaters
It sounds like Valve is taking advantage of a neural network to combat the spread of cheats in Counter-Strike: Global Offensive. Posting on Reddit, someone using the moderator-verified Valve Anti-Cheat account wrote that a fix is in the works for folks using spinbot hacks. A spinbot, as Rock, Paper, Shotgun describes it, helps avoid being hit by other players' weapons. Combined with aiming cheats, it makes the cheater pretty impervious to defeat.
Valve says it's not responsible for 'CS:GO' gambling
Earlier this month, Washington state told Valve to stop allowing Counter-Strike: Global Offensive (CS:GO) gun skin transfers through Steam. The state's Gambling Commission argued that Valve was facilitating a "large, unregulated black market," and gave it until October 14th to explain itself. Yesterday (three days after that deadline), Valve responded, vehemently denying any wrongdoing. In a copy of a letter to the Commission, sent by Valve to Engadget, the company's legal counsel Liam Lavery says there's "no factual or legal support" for the allegations. "As we have explained on multiple occasions, Valve is not engaged in gambling or the promotion of gambling, and we do not 'facilitate' gambling," Lavery states. "We were surprised and disappointed that the Commission chose to publicly accuse Valve of illegal activity and threaten our employees with criminal charges."
Washington state orders Valve to end 'Counter-Strike' gambling
For Washington state, it's not enough for Valve to distance itself from gun skin gambling in Counter-Strike: Global Offensive -- it wants the company to put an end to the practice. The state's Gambling Commission has ordered Valve to "stop allowing the transfer" of gun skins for gambling through Steam. The gaming giant has until October 14th to explain how it's obeying Washington gambling laws -- if it ignores the request or can't prove that it's squeaky-clean, it might face "additional civil or criminal action."
Twitter streams its first eSports tournament this weekend
Twitter is expanding beyond traditional stick-and-ball streams and moving into the lucrative eSports realm this weekend. As part of a partnership with Eleague and Turner Broadcasting, the microblogging service will air two days of Counter-Strike: Global Offensive play from Atlanta. The action starts today at 5pm Eastern with semi-finals. Eleague's end-of-season championship play starts Saturday afternoon at 4 Eastern with two teams going head to head in a best-of-three series.
Twitch streamer banned for shady betting on 'Counter-Strike'
Recently, some high-profile video game streamers have been exposed as owning third-party gambling sites where players can bet on the outcome of matches for Counter-Strike: Global Offensive — an obvious conflict of interest. Last week, Twitch announced that anyone violating a game's terms of service would be prohibited from broadcasting, and they've followed up by banning a prominent streamer who had 1.3 million followers.
Valve will ban Steam cheaters via their linked phone numbers
Valve knows that players cheating on Steam is a serious problem, and it's taking action to address that in a few new ways. One is offering a matchmaking service for Counter-Strike: Global Offensive that's only for folks who've linked their phone number to their Steam account, for two-factor authentication purposes, dubbed "Prime." Any cheating inside that space will result in your number being banned. The next step takes the previous one further and goes platform-wide. Because cheaters tend to have multiple Steam accounts (but typically one phone number), any account associated with a phone number flagged for by Valve Anti-Cheat will be banned for three months. Boom.
Chrome gaming add-ons steal your Steam inventory
Beware browser add-ons that promise to boost your Steam-based games -- you might be in for a rude surprise. Security gurus have spotted a known scammer offering Chrome extensions that claim to change your Counter-Strike: Global Offensive theme or help you gamble, but do nothing more than steal from your Steam inventory. It's not the greatest loss if you're a victim (the malware isn't compromising the games or your Steam account), but it'll probably leave you crestfallen if you spent ages collecting rare virtual objects.
Deadmau5 is on Twitch
If it weren't for Deadmau5's terrible broadband speeds, he wouldn't be on Twitch, the live video-streaming site favored by gamers. Prior to moving to the Canadian countryside just outside of Toronto and building "a goddamned death ray" in his back yard to get paltry 5 Mbps downloads, the electronic musician, whose real name is Joel Zimmerman, had relied on a gigabit connection to broadcast music-making sessions in 2K resolution using his own data service provider. "The quality was pretty comparable [to Twitch], but I didn't have a social network behind it to help it along," he said during an interview from the first-ever TwitchCon. Now his TriCaster streaming setup is as good as "a $50,000 doorstop," and he instead uses the open-source OBS streaming software to broadcast games like Rocket League, and Counter-Strike: Global Offensive; and studio recording sessions from his basement like the rest of us.
SteelSeries shows off new WoW wireless mouse, cache of corded rodents and a headset at E3
This time last year, SteelSeries showed us a headset and mouse meant for Diablo III, but at E3 2012, the company showed us a bunch of goodies. The highlight is the inaugural SteelSeries cordless offering, aptly named the World of Warcraft wireless mouse, which sports a themed skin and glowing white runes and logo on the palmrest (at least that's the plan, the prototype unit we saw didn't light up). Similarly, the charging base is studded in true Azeroth style and ringed in blue runes to let you know when it's powered up, plus it can be connected to your computer via microUSB if you want to play and charge simultaneously. It's PC and Mac compatible, comes with 11 programmable buttons, and once you've given it 60 minutes to fill its tank, you'll get up to 16 hours of continuous, intensive game play. It's set for a release in the latter half of this year and will cost $129. Along with the WoW model, we also got to see the gunmetal grey MLG edition Sensei and a pair of special-edition Kana mice -- for Dota 2 and CounterStrike: Global Offensive -- each uniquely skinned in the style of their namesake games. To go along with the CS:GO rodent, there's an accompanying headset (a Siberia v2 with a camo paint job) as well. Rounding things out is a GuildWars 2 branded headset and Sensei mouse. The stereo headset is the on-ear variety, and its flexible white frame can be folded down during travel. A 3.5mm input resides at the base of each earcup, and the open jack can be used to connect another set of headphones to share your audio with a friend. The headset's priced at $100, while the mouse will retail for $70 and will land on store shelves when Guildwars 2 is released.%Gallery-157403%
