CSGO players facing new VAC verification issues after Steam crash

It’s not like it’s been difficult enough to get into a game of CS:GO with Trusted Mode and its issues. However, there’s now a new problem facing CS:GO players after Steam’s crash on August 6 ⁠— VAC verification issues.

CS:GO has been a bit of a finicky beast as of late. Since the Trusted Mode update in July, players have struggled to log onto the Valve FPS title, often being blacklisted for having applications like OBS or certain mouse drivers open.

While the kinks are being slowly ironed out, a new problem has appeared. After the Steam crash on August 6, it appears like Valve’s servers are slow to get going in CS:GO.

Numerous players from across the world have reported new VAC verification issues when trying to launch CS:GO since the crash. The problems are separate from anything players have experienced with Trusted Mode, but the two could be tied together.

Players are receiving the error “VAC unable to verify game” when trying to get into queue for any matchmade mode in CS:GO. This ultimately means players can’t join VAC-protected servers.

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While verifying game files has done the trick with fixing this in the past, players have reported the usual workarounds are failing. Uninstalling and reinstalling CS:GO doesn’t seem to work. Neither does deleting Steam, or verifying the integrity of the game files.

Until it’s fixed, there’s no real way of playing CS:GO. No VAC authentication equals no game time for most.

Some players have found a workaround by going into the Steam files and overwriting the SteamService.exe file. Here’s how you can do that, thanks to Redditor ‘MotoNomadic’.

1. Navigate to your Steam folder in Program Files (x86) if you are on Windows. The directory is typically C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam.
2. Go into your “bin” folder and find the SteamService.exe file.
3. Copy and paste it into C:\Program Files (x86)\commonfiles\steam.
4. Replace the existing file.
5. Boot up Steam and CS:GO again to test if it’s worked.

If this doesn’t work, you’ll just have to hold tight. Valve are yet to comment on the issue, so until a permanent fix is discovered you might just be out of luck.