We are talking about Counter Strike 2, a complete rewrite of the game’s code for a new game engine. EVERYTHING has fundamentally changed over the last year.
Players are hurt from having it split. Way more so than Valve. In fact, I fail to see why Valve would be gaining anything, they aren’t selling the missing parts.
When a game updates, do you keep matchmaking servers up for every old edition of the game? Place people in a different queue for every hotfix version they are on? When the game is updated often over a lifespan of 12 years? Then no one would be in any matchmaking, let alone enough people of your skill level.
If they marketed this as “CSGO: Source 2 engine update” people wouldn’t be whining, so I don’t understand why people go out of their way to make a big deal about this. We knew not all the content would be available at release when they completely rewrote and modernized the game’s code.
And no anti-consumer business practices involved. You CAN play csgo still, if you want to. Sure, it’s inconvenient to download an old version of the game to run, but it is also inconvenient to download an old version of any game to run in every case. Anyone saying CSGO is unplayable and “that’s unfair because I paid for it” is maliciously spreading misinformation.