Valve removes community-made CS2 Transit map over racial slur, crypto marketing and copyrighted images from Stray

Valve has recently removed the community-made Transit map from Counter-Strike 2’s official matchmaking rotation, just two days after its addition on October 2, 2025, without providing further context. Gamers like Ozzny_CS2 on X howeve,r quickly identified a racial slur embedded in the map’s files.

Transit was designed for Wingman mode and is set in a Vietnamese town. It was one of four new maps introduced in the update, joined by Rooftop for Wingman, Palacio, and Golden for Competitive, Casual, and Deathmatch.

Transit had been in development by its creators for over a year before Valve cherry-picked it from the Steam Workshop in an effort to bolster the game’s player engagement.

The controversy first picked up traction when players, using console commands like “ent_fire,” discovered an entity named “n***a_cat” tied to interactive posters showing the orange cat from the PlayStation title, Stray.

This seems to be a forgotten crude joke added during Transit’s development phase, which doubled as a copyright violation.

However, further scrutiny revealed scattered references revealed cryptocurrency schemes, including an infamous Russian Ponzi operation known as MMM, etched into the skybox, alongside nods to FPIBank. This memecoin seems to be an inside joke among Russian developers.

Still, further easter eggs consisting of posters of the Stray cat were scattered across the map. Collecting all of these would trigger an animation of the cat zipping along a wire in a bucket, and it was accessible through CS2’s console.

Valve’s update log noted: “Removed Transit from official matchmaking,” citing no further elaboration. Still, players curious about Transit can check out the map, as it’s currently available in Steam Workshop.

Maxim “Rikuda”, one of the developers behind Transit, owned up to the gaffe on Discord. He said that it was “just a joke that I then forgot to rename.” He cleared the air on the matter, stating that it was added as a homage to the recurring phonetic YouTube meme and bore no ill intent.

While admitting “it was incredibly stupid,” he expressed frustration over the fact that Valve didn’t reach out to him, stating that the fix would’ve taken “five minutes” or even “a simple two-minute task.”

He was a bit disappointed, realizing that “Valve will probably never add his maps to the game again due to this situation.”