Valve yoinked a new Counter-Strike 2 map out of the game after just 2 days, either for potential Disney copyright infringement, a ‘gamer word’ hidden in its data, or both
“Valve added a bunch of new community maps to Counter-Strike 2 on October 2nd,” SteamDB wrote in an October 4 BlueSky post, “and now one of the maps, Transit, has been removed due to potential copyright issues and one of the entity names having a gamer word.” Attached was a picture of a distinctively-shaped building in de_transit’s skybox.
I resent having enough of an internet poisoned brain to parse that statement, and wanted to know more. For any normal people with healthy relationships reading this, “gamer word” is a sarcastic turn of phrase that emerged out of the fracas of influencer PewDiePie’s use of a racial slur in a 2017 PUBG Twitch stream, infamously excused by one defender as a “heated gaming moment.”
Valve added four new maps to Counter-Strike 2 in an update published October 1: Transit, Golden, Palacio, and Rooftop. These were community maps made official and put into Counter-Strike 2’s rotation by Valve. Two days later on October 3, Valve put out a laconic update with just three changes, one of which was “Removed Transit from official matchmaking.”
Absent explanation from Valve, we can only speculate, but the most likely culprit is the entity name (how an in-game object is identified in CS2’s scripting) of a unique object on de_transit. There’s an easter egg on the map with “have you seen me?” missing posters featuring the cat from 2022 cat sim, Stray.
As explained by TheAliasILike on the Global Offensive subreddit, interacting with all four posters spawns a fifth, and interacting with the last one activates a special event where a cat in a bucket ziplines across the map. It’s a very fun, classic sort of easter egg.
What’s less fun is the poster’s entity name, which incorporates a racial slur. Counter-Strike map maker AlphaOwl shared a purported Discord message from the co-designer of Transit responsible for the offending entity.
“I want to say it was my fault,” the user, named Rikuda, wrote. “That entity was just a joke that I forgot to rename. I won’t make any excuses, I just want to apologize to everyone. That’s all.”
This is almost assuredly why Valve removed the map, but some speculation has also centered on that building in Transit’s skybox highlighted in SteamDB’s initial post. Labeled “FPI Bank” in-game, its distinctive shape is a clear reference to the “Doofenshmirtz Evil Inc.” building from the children’s TV show, Phineas and Ferb.
This strikes me as a far less likely pain point for Valve, and is the sort of reference or easter egg we see all the time in games. The one thing that gives me pause is that Phineas and Ferb is owned by the litigious Disney corporation, which might object to its IP being at all associated with a violent videogame where you can play as a terrorist bomber.
Regardless, it’s a shame: An instance of casual, callous racism in the competitive gaming scene serving to make people feel unwelcome in the community. As AlphaOwl noted, Rikuda not only blew up their own mapmaking career with a distasteful, puerile gesture, their collaborators on Transit have also been tarred by the association, their working relationship with Valve potentially ruined. The triumph of having their design officially added to Counter-Strike is now a bitter loss.
