If they cared about peaking hype they wouldn’t have told us about the performance problems. But frankly they don’t need to hype CS2 or even sell big at release and they’re well aware of it. Games like the latest annual COD have to sell as much as possible at release because they need players to fill the servers, they need to have an established player base to sell the battle passes to after a month, and the game has a maximum shelf life of a year, before it’s abandoned for the next game. But CS on the other hand doesn’t need to do any of that. It has virtually zero competition so it has a captive audience of everyone who likes modern city builder games, and it doesn’t matter when you buy it, because they aren’t making another one for 5-8 years. They know exactly how much money they’re going to make from this game and they’ll get yours too, whether it’s at release or a year from now.

To put it in perspective, COD games are made fast, and have to sell fast. Since CS1 released, there have been TEN Call of Duty games. In that same timespan were about to get ONE new Cities game.