CS:GO smashes player records as Counter-Strike 2 hype mounts
A smooth 200,000 players over the 2020 lockdown records.
When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.
The prospect ofCounter-Strike 2has a lot of people playingCS:GO, with a new all-time peak player record of 1,519,457 being set today. That’s a number reported by bothSteamDBandSteamcharts, and it’s wildly higher than CS:GO’s prior high water marks. CS:GO’s previous high point was in April 2020, when pandemic lockdowns across the world saw many games—and Steam itself—report record player numbers.
That’s because Counter-Strike 2 was announced this week. It’s a real game, it’s free, andeverything in it carries overfrom Counter-Strike: Global Offensive. Everyone’s fancy skins are going to Source Engine 2 land. Yes, eventhat one person’s $150,000 gun skin. It has sent the CS skin marketplacestraight to crazytown.
Today’s record beats the prior count by over 200,000 players. The reason? Well, popular theory says that it’s because Counter-Strike 2 beta access is only going to people who play a lot of Counter-Strike. (Andno cheaters or jerks are getting in, which is hysterical.) That, or it’s just a lot of former or lapsed players getting nostalgic about Counter-Strike and wanting to experience it at its peak before CS2 hits and steals away the player count.
Counter-Strike: Global Offensive has been on the rise since launch, rarely falling over the course of a single year outside of an extended nadir in 2018. Even that low point, however, was still netting over 400,000 daily players. Late 2018 saw the release of the free version of CS:GO, and the average year-over-year has stabilized at something like a million players since.
The reaction to Counter-Strike 2 has been pretty much what you’d expect from an impressive, interesting-looking update to a staple shooter for both casual and esports players:Almost universally positive. Resident Counter-Strike head Rich Stanton said that Valve may well have created his dream game, dumpinga laundry list of improvementshe’d noticed onto the site.
Oh, and for those of you worried that CS2 will steal all the CS:GO players away? Probably not. People still play CS 1.6, after all.
The biggest gaming news, reviews and hardware deals
Keep up to date with the most important stories and the best deals, as picked by the PC Gamer team.
Jon Bolding is a games writer and critic with an extensive background in strategy games. When he’s not on his PC, he can be found playing every tabletop game under the sun.
Black Ops 6 is wasting no time stinking up the joint with ugly skins
The most underrated shooter of 2023 is free on Epic right now, and going for cheap on Steam
The first PUBG spinoff with real promise is a top-down take on Rainbow Six Siege
