CSGO’s Steam store page disappearing reveals hidden Steam apps

Mar 10, 2021

Reading time: 2 min

Early in the morning of March 9, Valve’s flagship first-person shooter Counter-Strike: Global Offensive disappeared from the Steam Store. Players could still play it and could even find it when searching the Steam Store, but for an hour, CSGO and some other games blinked in and out of existence.

SteamDB creator Pavel X tweeted out a quick CSGO joke before saying that he thought the hiccup was a bug due the way Steam’s APIs function. Even the official Twitter account for CSGO got in on the fun.

CS:GO isn’t just the only app that disappeared from the Steam Store. Something went wrong on Valve’s end there, when they disappeared a few appids showed up in a store api (0, 160, 202) that shouldn’t have.

List of affected apps: https://t.co/4nDGgWEtnH

— Pavel Djundik (@thexpaw) March 9, 2021

https://t.co/ilJQtaBQxS pic.twitter.com/C5LFdUZGll

— CS:GO (@CSGO) March 9, 2021

CSGO vanishes for an hour as three ancient apps take its place

But this is only the most recent time CSGO has vanished into thin air. CSGO actually disappeared from the Steam storefront last week as well, only to return shortly after. Many players thought that the disappearance meant that Source 2 was on its way. That hasn’t happened just yet, but something strange has.

Three apps suddenly appeared while everything else was going haywire. Steam app 0, Steam app 160, and Steam app 201. Steamdb had records for all three.

Zero originally refers to the most basic building blocks of Counter-Strike and Half-Life on Windows, as well as the father of the Source engine, GoldSrc. Today, it doesn’t look like there is an “AppID 0,” but GoldSrc is listed as App 1. App 160 is listed as “SourceInit,” and included with Steam’s Mac version, but it’s also tied to the Steam package and the development branch for Proton, a program branch developed by Valve to allow for the easier running of games on the OS. Finally, App 201 is listed as the shared parts of the 2013 version of the Source Engine. That version was the last official version of the CSGO engine Valve released from top to bottom.

Tracking Valve seems to be getting increasingly more difficult at the same time that things are getting more odd, and it almost certainly means something is in the pipeline for Valve. Users can take from this what they will. But strange things have been happening behind the scenes of CSGO for months now. From the sudden release of Operation Broken Fang, to Valve’s equally sudden silence, all combined with more hints that Source 2 is on its way, the developer has fans on the edges of their seats.