I find it odd there has been very little noise about this. Like sweet its awesome to see that there is a new Counter strike and the features they are adding seem awesome. People were very angry when Blizzard did this same exact thing, where is the anger right now about this?
I'm not here to say Valve should forever support their games, its just seems weird to kill it when there are fundamental differences between the games. Kill the official servers, that is fine since the community will just adjust and host their own servers but basically zapping the game out of existence seems wrong and it continues the worrying trends we have that can revolve around game preservation.
All I'm saying is having a hacky solution is nice but you can't build communities solely on that. You need methods for the laymen. Imagine if you will they killed Half Life 1 in the same way. You bought a game but they chose to upgrade it for free. You would be stuck with that utter garbage port called Half Life Source. Like sure you can maybe find a workaround via steam console or if you had the disc you can get around it. Its just bad look.
We already heard news that valve may be forced to remove some depots because there were rumors around the times when people were "downgrading" their GTA games because the music licenses were expired and rockstar had to legally remove them (even though that is fucking annoying and sucks). I think we can't just rely on these outdated depots forever.