Counter-Strike: Global Offensive It’s more than ten years old and much of the game design that underpins it dates back to the original mod in 2000. However, today it is arguably more popular than ever, after breaking human records. all-time concurrent play earlier today.
Earlier on February 11, 1,320,219 people played CS:GO at the same time according to Steam’s own statistics. That beats the previous record of 1,308,963 from April 2020. You can view historical data most easily. via SteamDB.
I think it’s reasonable to speculate that the peak in April 2020 is partly driven by a global pandemic that increases player numbers in the game as a whole. The latest peak is harder to diagnose, although there was an update yesterday introducing New community-created weapons completed and stickers. Perhaps the ultimate motivation is that a lot of people want to download Denzel Curry’s music in the game.
The more likely reason is that CS:GO has been steadily increasing in popularity over the months, with the previous recent weekend close to breaking records.
As noted above, in an almost constantly changing genre, Counter-Strike has remained fairly static for nearly two decades. CS:GO’s innovations come from a new competitive ranking, a new progression system, and some new maps, while its modes and arsenal are mostly untouched. Valve made a rare tweak to its two most popular weapons last November.
While CS:GO is clearly in bad shape, the Team Fortress 2 community has protested in recent months due to the lack of support from Valve. Valve announced last week that they will be releasing a big update to their other team shooter this summeralthough the announcement post mainly consisted of Valve asking the community of Team Fortress 2 to do the update for them.
