How To Make a Non-STEAM Counter-Strike: Global Offensive Server Using RevEmu or LumaEmu

According to the official game and player statistics from STEAM, the number of players for Counter-Strike: Source has dropped drastically while the latest Counter-Strike: Global Offensive is the 2nd most played STEAM game after Dota 2. The combination of STEAM players from CS1.6 with CS:S merely takes up 10% of CS:GO. This clearly shows that Counter-Strike: Global Offensive is currently the more popular game in the Counter-Strike series.

Installing and running a dedicated CS:GO server is not difficult while the most challenging task is actually getting enough players to join and play in your server as long as possible or else it would be an empty server without players. One potential way to attract more players to your server is to accept (pirated) non-steam players because the Setti Masterserver statistics shows that there are more CS1.6 and CS:S non-steam players than the legitimate Steam players.

In this article, we’ll show you how to download and install a Counter-Strike: Global Offensive server in Windows. After installation, you can proceed to configure it to accept non-steam players.

Downloading and Installing a Dedicated Counter-Strike: Global Offensive

1. Download SteamCMD GUI and extract the ZIP file after finished downloading.

2. Run SteamCMD GUI.exe

3. Click on the Download SteamCMD button located in Tools.

4. After it’s finished downloading SteamCMD, click on the folder icon located beside the Download SteamCMD button and extract steamcdm.zip file.

5. Click on the Browser button for the SteamCMD path and select the folder where SteamCMD is extracted to.

6. At Server Configuration, click on the drop down menu and select Counter-Strike: Global Offensive or Counter-Strike: Source.

7. Make sure Login as Anonymous checkbox is selected.

8. Click on the Browser button for Server Path. It is best to set it as C:\srcds.

9. Make sure the Validate Files checkbox is ticked and finally click the Update/Install button.

10. A command prompt window will open and SteamCMD will automatically start downloading the necessary files. The download will take a while to complete.

When you see a message that says “Success! App ‘740’ fully installed”, that means SteamCMD has finished downloading the necessary files to run a dedicated Counter-Strike: Global Offensive server. You can now close the command prompt window. It is actually sufficient to start a CS:GO server from the Run Server tab in the SteamCMD GUI application. First select the path of the downloaded files such as C:\srcds, then choose Counter-Strike: Global Offensive or Source from the drop down list, select a map, set an RCON password and click Run.

If you’d like to allow non-STEAM users to join your CS:GO server, you’ll need to perform additional steps below. Currently there are only 2 STEAM emulators which are LumaEmu and RevEmu that can turn your Source Dedicated Server into Non-Steam. You should use either emulator and not both at the same time.

Installing RevEmu in Counter-Strike: Global Offensive Dedicated Server

1. Download RevEmu 06.09.2014 Release and extract with an archiver that supports .7z format.

2. Go to the server folder from the extracted RevEmu 06.09.2014 Release and copy rev.ini to the folder where srcds.exe resides. It should probably be in C:\SRCDS\

3. Visit this webpage, scroll right to the bottom and download the latest RevEmu release.

4. Extract the latest RevEmu release that you’ve downloaded. Copy Steam.dll, steamclient.dll and the Steam folder from the latest RevEmu release to C:\SRCDS\bin\. You may overwrite the original steamclient.dll file.

5. From the latest RevEmu release, go to csgo\platform\ and copy all the files to C:\srcds\platform\

6. You can now run the server like normal using the SteamCMD GUI application and your server should accept non-steam players. If for some unknown reason you are unable to get RevEmu to work with your Counter-Strike: Global Offensive Dedicated Server, then try LumaEmu from the steps below. Make sure you’ve removed RevEmu before trying LumaEmu.

Installing LumaEmu in Counter-Strike: Global Offensive Dedicated Server

1. Visit this webpage and download the latest version of LumaEmu from the attachment at the first post. You may need to download using Internet Explorer because Firefox and Chrome blocks all files from the website.

2. Extract the downloaded LumaEmu file using an archiver that supports RAR format.

3. Open the extracted LumaEmu, go to x86 folder and copy the steamclient.dll file to C:\srcds\bin\ directory.

4. Go back one one level up to LumaEmu main folder and copy LumaEmu.ini to C:\srcds\.

5. Run the server using the normal command line or alternatively from the SteamCMD GUI Run Server tab.

Important Notes:

1. If non-steam players are unable to join the patched server and receive the message “STEAM validation rejected”, there is a very important registry key that you may need to remove. This is especially true if Steam is installed on the server because the registry string value is recreated whenever Steam runs to make sure that it is using the original untouched steamclient.dll rather than the patched steamclient.dll. To remove the SteamClientDll string value from registry, simply download the pre-made .reg file from the link below and run it each time before starting the server.

Download .REG File to Remove SteamClientDll String

Alternatively, you can also manually delete the SteamClientDll registry string from:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Valve\Steam\ActiveProcess

2. Both server and client must be running the same version in order for the client to connect to the server. If the server has been updated but the client still runs an older version, the client will see the following error message “Server is running a newer version, client version 13477, server version 13478” in the console.

3. It is common to see the message “Your server is out of date. Please update and restart” in the server’s console when the server is updated but still using an older version of RevEmu. The only solution is to wait for RevEmu to get updated and then install it on the server for the message to go away.

4. If your server is rejecting non-steam players with the message “Server only accepting connections from game lobby”, type sv_lan 1 in the server console to fix this.

5. Unfortunately a Source Dedicated Server does not support uPNP. So if you are connected through a router, you will need to manually configure your router to forward port 27015 for both TCP and UDP to allow players from the public Internet to connect to your server. You will have to refer to your router’s manual in order to setup port forwarding. Once you’ve done that, run the Counter-Strike: Source server and test the port forward to make sure that port 27015 can be found open on the Internet.