Sounds like classic money-grubbing Gaben.

Stop mod development to make it an easier purchase, then release it chocked-full of loot boxes.

I feel like it’d be wise to wait for further developments. Valve is notorious for being horrible at communication, but even then it’s rare that they do something like this without some sort of reason. It still sucks that Valve shut this down after 8 years, but it’s hard to know anything for certain until either side comes out with more information, especially with how stupid Valve’s legal team can be sometimes. Could be that they just backpedal and say it’s alright in a few days, who knows.

Of course, trusting Valve is always as risky as trusting any other corporation, given they have a bit of a track record with tolerating and even outright allowing gambling with skins, but this could easily be their legal team being overzealous yet again as well.

While this is classic Valve non-communication, apparently the devs were hacking or reverse-engineering some closed source stuff, that Valve might not have agreed with.

https://x.com/csco_dev/status/1533103185543548929

Just so we are clear on how the mod works on our side, there is no leaked code involved. We’re using a build from 2020 that has security exploits and a hacked dedicated server to be able to even play online while working on it internally.

The mod cannot be released in this state

This is all just some third-party information, I have no idea about this and don’t really care about Counter-Strike.