Counter-Strike 2

Counter-Strike 2 won Best Esports Game at The Game Awards 2025, the competitive category it has now dominated across two decades of the franchise. Built on the Source 2 engine and rolled out free to every existing CS:GO player in 2023, it rewrote the series' smoke grenades as volumetric objects, rebuilt tick-rate into sub-tick updates and kept the 5v5 economy formula untouched. In 2025 its Major circuit drew record viewership, with the Budapest Major peaking at over two million concurrent viewers and prize pools across the year exceeding thirty million dollars.

Developer

Valve Corporation

Nationality

United States

Released

September 27, 2023

Engine

Source 2

Best Esports Game

The Game Awards 2025

Franchise age

25+ years of continuous competition