CS:GO goes F2P and gets Battle Royale

After teasing a big CSGO content drop on Twitter, Valve today pushed a brand new update to live servers that adds a new battle royale mode and brand new skins. Alongside the update, CSGO has now been made free to play. Here is everything there is to know about the latest CSGO features and changes.

New CSGO Dangerzone Battle Royale mode

There have been hints of an upcoming battle royale mode hiding in the CSGO game code for quite some time, so it’s not such a big surprise to see this update add Dangerzone, a BR game mode to rival PUBG and Fortnite.

© Valve Corporation

Dangerzone is available to all players. In Dangerzone, up to 18 players can drop in solo, with a friend, or a trio and fight against others. Just like other battle royale games, players are only given one life and the winner is the last man or team standing.

In Dangerzone, players must earn money by performing certain tasks or killing players. Tasks can include finding C4 and destroying safes, carrying hostages found in the map to evacuation zones, or killing players that have a bounty on their head. This money can be used to buy personal airdrops that get dropped in by drones. Loot can also be found across the map.

The map itself is large for a CSGO map, but it’s not very big in comparison to other battle royale maps. When you consider that the player cap is just 18 players, the map is realistically the perfect size. The weapons are the same as the ones in matchmaking and even share the same stats, but ammo is sparse. This puts more of a focus on playing stealthily and conserving ammo, quite the contrast to other battle royale games.

CSGO goes Free to Play and New Skins

On top of the new battle royale mode, CSGO has now gone free to play. This is likely a move to help boost the slowly falling player count in Counter Strike: Global Offensive. I’m not sure how successful this move will be considering CS:GO has been available on sale many times multiple years in a row.

It also raises a concern about cheaters – it will now be far easier for cheaters to create a new account and get playing again with their cheats if they get banned. In another strange move, all players that purchased CSGO before this change will now be given Prime status.

Prime status was previously reserved to those that verified their mobile number through the Steam Guard app. It was a method used to make it more difficult for cheaters to get into high priority queues. Now that everybody has Prime status, it may be the case that Prime matchmaking sees more cheaters, at least for the next few months.

© Valve Corporation

Finally, the new CSGO update added a brand new case called the Danger Zone case – it includes 17 new weapon skins and the Horizon knives. Players that have Prime Status can also get a free MP5-SD Lab Rats Souvenir skin for playing the Dangerzone mode.

Summary

What are your thoughts on this latest CSGO update? Do you think going free to play was a good move or a bad move by Valve?