Why Counter-Strike players think Valve is about to announce 'Counter-Strike 2'

pcgamer.com:

A perennial rumour in  the Counter-Strike: Global Offensive ecosystem has been the theory that the now 10-year-old FPS will be ported to Valve's current in-house engine, Source 2. This past week, the speculation and whispers have gone into overdrive, with many convinced that a 'new' version of perhaps the iconic PC game is on the way.

CS:GO as it stands was made with Valve's older Source engine. What an upgrade to Source 2 would actually look like is the subject of some debate, with some starry-eyed about the prospect of a rebuilt game that follows in the longer history of Counter-Strike being re-released in new forms, while others are more downbeat and expect any eventual Source 2 version to be 'only' a minor visual upgrade, possibly with the official 128-tick servers players have long pined for.

Last week a leak buried in Nvidia's latest drivers(opens in new tab) not only reignited speculation about the Source 2 version of CS:GO, but sent it into orbit with several prominent community members and the esports figure Richard Lewis joining in to flesh out the leak with reports. First data miner Aquarius found a pair of config profiles added to the latest Nvidia graphics drivers, both called «Counter-Strike 2», and two executables called «cs2.exe» and «csgos2.exe.»

I've checked the files and they're there, so this at least is real. There are also other references to it elsewhere in Nvidia's other software, like GeForce Experience, but perhaps the most telling tidbit of all is that whatever this is will use the same Steam app ID as Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, which is 730. Don't expect this to be a full-on sequel.

Then: the megaton! Valve updated the CS:GO twitter(opens in new tab) banner image to one that simply read