[botmeister]

The fundamental problem in this case is simple: steam removed the beta test cycle. Valve deserves a whole lot more bitching than they are getting imo. You cannot remove a beta cycle and expect people to be happy about it. Had there been a beta release of the Feb 9 update, the plugin community would of quickly tested their plugins out on it, wrote to Valve about the problem(s), and found solutions in time for the official release. That is what happned prior to CS 1.6. I know because I was using their engine update betas and I had to make changes and research solutions. It worked, and it worked well. After steam came along - poof, no more beta and the instant CS 1.6 was officially released, nothing worked! Damn that pissed me off, and it pissed off a lot of other people. Now my servers are almost bone dry, and that means Valve had just lost a lot of customers.

Valve has to reintroduce the beta cycle or they will continue to face angry users and a shrinking customer base. A beta cycle is simply good for business. Having said that, the lack of a beta is not the only reason we're seeing less people playing games like CS, but that's another topic altogether.