In what will probably be the day’s least shocking news, the Counter-Strike: Global Offensive closed beta has been delayed.
Valve said back in August that the Counter-Strike: Global Offensive beta was expected to begin sometime in October. At this moment there are roughly ten hours of October left, which means that if this thing is going to happen, Valve will really need to get a move on. And here’s a hint for the die-hard optimists among you: it’s not going to happen.
Valve’s Chet Faliszek said in a recent interview that the beta was “delayed a bit” after a handful of professional gamers spent some time with the game. “They gave us a lot of feedback on things we should get in the game before we release it, otherwise we’re going to be getting a lot of bug reports or a lot of feedback that would just be redundant because we already know we should fix those issues,” he said. “Just knowing there’s some feel and some ‘operating the game’ issues that need to be resolved first, we want to get those done first.”
“October is getting scary now,” he continued. “We are testing those changes but we can’t just put in everything at once, you need to put them in steps so you can evaluate the individual changes. We’re pushing as hard as we can on that.”
The beta will begin with about 10,000 people, he said, and will grow incrementally as Valve tests server infrastructure and scalability. The first group of beta testers will be looking primarily for crash issues rather than matters of gameplay, which has the potential to slow the beta down, but eventually the gates will be thrown open to everyone, and it will run for as long as it needs to.
“When does it end? When the community tells us it ends,” he said. “We have no mandate from anybody of when we have to ship this, and so we’re more than happy to just keep working on it until it’s ready to ship.”
