It seems like Counter Strike 2 is coming sooner than expected.

There has been no official announcement made by Valve, but gamers on Twitter found out that the recent Nvidia drivers introduced support for two new executables "csgos2.exe" and "cs2.exe", which appears to indicate that there will be a new game coming from the Counter Strike franchise.

Other than that, esports journalist Richard Lewis also affirmed the news, stating that the upcoming game is "almost certainly set to be released under the working title Counter-Strike 2," and that it could be launched in beta as soon as in late March.

According to Lewis, sources have explained that the reason some bugs in CS:GO are not being addressed is due to the team allocating more resources to the development of this upcoming project. Their aim is to ensure that the game is polished and meets the expectations of players in terms of the level and quality that is expected of CS:GO.

Other than stating that the game will be on the Source 2 engine, featuring improved graphics and optimization, sources also confirmed that the game will be played on 128-tick servers, in line with the performance of rival shooter Valorant.

However, there are also users indicating that the "cs2.exe" found in Nvidia driver is "old and irrelevant", and that "no separate games are being made". Instead of a new game, it would only be CS:GO moving to the Source 2 engine, as pointed out by @aquaismissing.

With sources being optimistic this time out, we might be able to see a major update in the Counter Strike franchise in the near future. As of now, only Valve itself has the answer to whether it would be Counter Strike 2 or CS:GO on Source 2.