Counter-Strike: Global Offensive is usually the most popular game on Steam. For a few bizarre hours last night, it was no longer available on Steam. CS:GO, and a seemingly random assortment of other Steam titles briefly disappeared from the store, and nobody seems to know why. Valve has acknowledged that it happened, but hasn’t provided any details on why.
At around midnight in the US on March 9, CS:GO was removed from the Steam store. A couple of games like, er, Paws and Claws: Pet Vet and Section 8: Prejudice were removed at the same time, as were DLC packs for everything from Fallout: New Vegas to Black Desert Online. A handful of movies and shows were removed as well, including Mad Max, Clerks, and Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex. Truly a dark time for our culture.
As you can see on SteamDB, every title disappeared at once, and then they were all restored a little over two hours later. There was no apparent drop-off in CS:GO players during that period, so it looks like this just affected the store page – not the game itself.
So far, this tweet has been Valve’s only response.
https://t.co/ilJQtaBQxS pic.twitter.com/C5LFdUZGll
— CS:GO (@CSGO) March 9, 2021
We’ve reached out to Valve directly for further details, because really, what the heck, man? One of the biggest multiplayer games on the planet just disappears from its only storefront for a few hours? We gotta know what happened there.