In the midst of the hype around a long-awaited sequel, Counter-Strike: Global Offensive a.k.a CS:GO has seen a meteoric uptick in concurrent players, hitting an all-time peak on Sunday.
According to Steam’s own charts and SteamDB’s chart system, Counter-Strike: Global Offensive is currently sitting at the tippy-top of Steam’s most-played games list with over 600,000 players currently in-game as of writing. Not just that, but CS:GO even broke its own record for all-time concurrent player peak this weekend.
According to SteamDB, this weekend saw Counter-Strike: Global Offensive smash its all-time peak of concurrent players yet again, with the most recent time actually being around when the Counter-Strike 2 rumours restarted. At the start of this month, CS:GO reached a record-breaking 1,323,700 concurrent players. Yesterday, it reached 1,519,457.
At the start of the month, there were rumours going around that Counter-Strike 2 was a real thing happening due to new support listings in NVIDIA drivers called “csgos2.exe” and “cs2.exe”. This was followed by journalist Richard Lewis receiving reports from insider sources that a new version of Counter-Strike was coming.
This was followed by a mixed response of yaysayers and naysayers, with some saying that this was simply an update for the existing game onto the Source 2 engine, and others saying it was a whole new game. In a way, they were both right!
The middle of last week saw the announcement of Counter-Strike 2, a free update to the existing Counter-Strike: Global Offensive title. Valve is calling it “the largest technical leap forward in Counter-Strike‘s history”, with the sequel-lite set to release later this year.
The news of Counter-Strike 2 also came with the release of a limited test of the game, allowing select players to give the new and improved game a try. That said, the players allowed into the limited test must hit specific requirements, including “recent playtime on Valve official servers“.
So in light of all that news, from the announcement of Counter-Strike 2 to the revelation of people needing to play a whole lot of CS:GO to be able to get into the limited test, it looks like the 2012 shooter has had a spike in players. That’s wild, though, right? 1.5 million people in a game at once is truly bonkers!
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