If you’re a long-time Counter-Strike fan who cut their teeth on Global Offensive’s classic maps, gunplay, and weird, wonderful community game modes, you’ve probably asked can you still play csgo after cs2 at least once since Valve’s Source 2 upgrade launched. A lot of players were frustrated when CS2 replaced CSGO in Steam libraries overnight, missing the older title’s consistent feel, lower hardware requirements, and massive catalog of custom content. I’ve moderated a CSGO surf server for 8 years, and we still pull in 120+ active players every Friday night, long after CS2’s full release, so I’ve walked hundreds of players through this exact question. This guide breaks down everything you need to know about accessing and playing legacy CSGO in 2024 and beyond.
Can You Still Play CSGO After CS2? The Short Answer
The short answer is yes, you absolutely can still access and play the original CSGO client, even if CS2 is the default Counter-Strike installation in your Steam library now. Valve did not delete or delist the legacy CSGO client entirely, even after they shut down official CSGO matchmaking services months after CS2’s launch. That said, there are important limits to what you can do with the legacy client that you need to know before you download it.
Official competitive matchmaking for CSGO is permanently disabled, so you won’t be able to climb the old CSGO rank ladder or play official casual, deathmatch, or wingman modes through Valve’s servers. All official CSGO rank data was archived when matchmaking shut down, so you won’t lose your old rank badges, but you can’t earn new ones on the legacy client. All existing CSGO inventory items work in both the legacy client and CS2 too, so you don’t have to worry about losing access to your skins, stickers, or collectibles if you jump back to the old game.
You also won’t get any future updates for the legacy CSGO client. Valve has halted all development, bug fixes, and security patches for the old game, so any existing glitches or exploits will remain unaddressed permanently. That’s an important consideration if you plan to play on public servers, but it’s a small tradeoff for most players who just want to revisit classic gameplay.
How to Access the Legacy CSGO Client on Steam
Accessing the legacy CSGO client only takes a few minutes, and you don’t need any special permissions or third-party tools to do it. The entire process runs directly through Steam’s built-in beta system, and it’s completely free for any user who owns Counter-Strike 2 (which is free to play for all Steam users anyway). Follow these steps exactly to avoid errors during installation:
- Open your Steam library and find Counter-Strike 2 in your installed or owned games list
- Right click the Counter-Strike 2 title, and select "Properties" from the dropdown menu that appears
- Navigate to the "Betas" tab in the left sidebar of the properties window
- Select "csgo_legacy - Legacy Version of Counter-Strike: Global Offensive" from the beta participation dropdown menu
- Close the properties window and wait for the roughly 15GB legacy CSGO client to finish downloading and installing
You don't need to pay any extra fee to access the legacy CSGO client, even if you never purchased CSGO back when it was a paid game before going free to play in 2018. If you already have CS2 installed, the legacy client will download as a separate installation, so you won’t have to delete or modify your CS2 files to play the old game. You can switch between CS2 and legacy CSGO at any time by going back to the betas tab and selecting "None" to go back to CS2, or reselecting the csgo_legacy beta to jump back to the old game.
One common issue players run into is slow download speeds for the legacy client. This usually happens because Steam is routing your download through a overloaded server, so switching your download region in Steam settings to a less crowded area can fix the problem in most cases. You also want to make sure you have at least 20GB of free storage space on your drive to avoid installation errors.
What Content Is Available on Legacy CSGO?
While official matchmaking is gone, there’s still a huge amount of playable content on the legacy CSGO client, most of it supported by the game’s massive, dedicated community. The biggest draw for most returning players is the huge library of community servers, which host game modes that never made the jump to CS2, or that play very differently on the Source 2 engine. Most popular custom game modes only exist on legacy CSGO community servers, including classic zombie escape, jailbreak, surf, kz climb, deathrun, and custom casual modes with modified rules and maps.
You can also access every custom map ever made for CSGO through the Steam workshop, including fan favorites that Valve never ported to CS2, or maps that were changed drastically in the CS2 upgrade. A lot of players come back to legacy CSGO specifically to play the original versions of maps like Cache, Inferno, and Nuke, which feel very different from their CS2 counterparts. You can play all of these maps offline with bots too, if you don’t feel like joining public servers, or host private lobbies for you and your friends with custom rules.
Low-end PCs that struggle to run CS2 at 60FPS can often hit 144FPS or higher on legacy CSGO, which is another big reason a lot of players stick to the old client. CS2’s Source 2 engine has higher CPU and GPU requirements, and it still has performance issues on older hardware that Valve hasn’t fully fixed. If you play on a laptop or a budget desktop built before 2020, you’ll probably get much smoother performance on legacy CSGO, especially if you play competitive modes that rely on high, consistent frame rates.
The only major downsides to legacy CSGO content right now are the lack of official anti-cheat support, and the fact that no new content will ever be added. VAC still runs on most community servers, but Valve isn’t updating it for the legacy client, so some newer cheats might not be detected. Most large community servers run their own third-party anti-cheat tools to fix this gap, but you’ll run into more cheaters on smaller public servers than you would on official CS2 matchmaking.
Should You Stick to Legacy CSGO or Switch to CS2 Full Time?
There’s no universal right answer to this question, because it depends entirely on what you want out of Counter-Strike. If you primarily play official competitive matchmaking, or you follow pro CS tournaments and want to play the same version of the game that pros use, you should stick to CS2. All official competitive play, including Valve-sponsored tournaments and ranked matchmaking, is exclusive to CS2 now, and that’s not going to change.
If you mostly play custom community game modes, or you only play casual games with friends on private servers, legacy CSGO is probably the better pick for you. The community content library for CSGO is still 10 times larger than CS2’s, and a lot of modders have no plans to port their custom maps and modes to Source 2. There is no wrong choice between the two, as both cater to different player needs, and you can easily have both clients installed on your PC at the same time to switch between them whenever you want.
One thing to keep in mind if you’re on the fence is that the legacy CSGO community is still very active, but it’s not growing as fast as CS2’s. Most new players start with CS2, so you’ll see fewer new players on legacy CSGO servers over time. That said, the core community that stuck with the legacy client is extremely dedicated, so most popular server types will stay active for years to come, even as the overall player count shrinks.
At the end of the day, Counter-Strike has always been about the community first. Now that you know can you still play csgo after cs2, you can pick the version that fits your playstyle, hardware, and friend group best. You don’t have to pick one or the other either—keep both clients installed, and jump between them whenever you feel like it. The legacy CSGO community isn’t going anywhere anytime soon, so you’ll always have a place to jump back into the classic gameplay you know and love. Whether you’re here to grind surf maps, relive old Cache scrims with friends, or just mess around on zombie escape servers, the original CSGO is still right where you left it.