CS:GO has a new player record on Steam 10 years after its release

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Counter-Strike: Global Offensive enjoys great popularity on Steam and is one of the most played games on the platform. Now the first-person shooter has broken a new player record.

What is that record? On February 11, 1,320,219 people were playing CS:GO at the same time, according to Steam stats. This surpassed the previous record of 1,308,963 from April 2020. The game appeared as a mod in early 2000 and was officially released on Steam in 2012.

Currently (as of February 12th, 2023) the record has fallen again, but CS:GO is still the most played game on the platform:

  • With over 900,000 concurrent players, CS:GO is by far the #1 spot on Steam.
  • This is followed in second place by the newcomer Hogwarts Legacy with 560,000 active players.
  • MOBA Dota 2 follows in third place with 508,000 players.

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    Regular updates and big tournament attract players

    For many months, the number of active players in CS:GO has been slowly but steadily increasing. After the peak in April 2020, the numbers collapsed, but have been rising again since July 2021 (via steamdb.info).

    What is behind the success? On the one hand, there is a big tournament in CS:GO running over the weekend, from February 10th to 12th, 2023. At the IEM Katowice 2023, 24 teams in Poland will compete for prize money of 1.0 million euros. This attracts many players to check out the shooter themselves or to root for their favorite teams.

    On the other hand, the team behind the shooter has hardly changed the basic gameplay in the past. And that in a genre that is constantly changing or bringing out new games. But Counter-Strike: Global Offensive has offered the same gameplay formula for over 10 years: easy to learn but hard to master.

    The rest of the changes can be counted on one hand: there were new leaderboards, an improved progression system, and a handful of new maps. Game modes and weapons remained untouched except for a change in November 2022. But this change was quite big and changed one of the main weapons of the popular shooter.

    Counter-Strike is known for something else though, and that’s the outrageously expensive skins that you can buy and sell in-game. We’re talking about millions here. Because some players are willing to pay a lot of money for certain rare skins. And that’s gone if your own account with the skins is suddenly banned:

    An account on Steam has skins from CS: GO worth 4.7 million euros – players worry after the ban: “That’s so much money”

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