If you thought that Counter Strike’s days might be coming to an inevitable end with the likes of Valorant and Overwatch 2 coming up to spoil the team-based shooter party, think again. According to the latest Steam data, Counter Strike is having its best days ever, breaking records and solidifying its place as a number one game on the platform.
During Saturday, April 18, Steam data has shown Counter Strike Global Offensive’s numbers peaking at 1,305,714 concurrent players. This means that CS:GO just broke the record previously held by another Valve game – Dota 2. Dota 2 concurrent player record stood untouched since 2016 when the game held a major esports competition in Shanghai, China (in case you didn’t know, Chinese are crazy about Dota 2). Anyway, with Dota 2 popularity in an obvious decline, it would take a real miracle to reclaim the concurrent player record from Counter Strike: Global Offensive. It might even be a new milestone for some new yet unreleased games in the far off future…
If you’re trying to find explanations why CS:GO is seeing such a big resurgence of players, we should keep in mind a couple of things. First and foremost is the quarantine – well duh… People staying at home and playing CS:GO, it’s certainly not the worst time to sink some time when one is bored to the bones. Second, Valorant is coming up. While it does sound a bit silly, Valorant’s popularity on Twitch, lack of access to the closed beta, and game’s similarity to CS:GO might’ve helped the old-timer to attract some new players for the time being.
Or it just might be that CS:GO is still a damn good game and going free-to-play last year might be the best decision ever made by Valve. In any case, we can’t see this new record falling to other titles anytime soon, but CS:GO has a lot of time to surpass its own amazing result.
