30 days in the past, Counter-Strike: World Offensive broke its all-time report for concurrent gamers just like the boss it’s (opens in new tab). This iteration of the sport is eleven years outdated, whereas Counter-Strike itself has been round since 1999. Barely one month on, CS:GO has simply achieved it once more: This weekend it reached a brand new peak of 1.4 million concurrent gamers.
The earlier report was 1.32 million in February 2023. The brand new report was reached on Saturday March 11 at 13:00 UTC, per SteamDB (opens in new tab), and is 1,420,183 gamers directly. This kind of sustained progress so removed from the sport’s launch is exceptional and, whereas many have been theorising about why now, any reply finally finally ends up again on the sport’s rock -fundamentals. When Valorant got here out I believed this could be the sport to tempt me away from CS:GO. That did not final.
The CS:GO twitter account took a break from tormenting followers with memes to acknowledge the brand new milestone with what I suppose you would name a humble-gag.
Thanks to our 1.4M Twitter followers for organizing and taking part in CS:GO concurrently at this time.March 11, 2023
Additionally price noting is that this is not some random peak, however reflective of sustained excessive participant counts. Within the final 24 hours CS:GO practically broke the report once more, tipping out at 1.41 million, whereas on the time of writing over one million gamers are in there.
CS: GO did not launch in the most effective of situations, and the primary few years noticed large adjustments. You can also make an excellent argument that, along with the core of Counter-Strike goodness, what actually saved it was $400 knives (opens in new tab). However one thing that quite unbelievably started as a console port now stands as the best aggressive FPS of all time (opens in new tab), in addition to Steam’s hottest sport by an ideal distance.
One fascinating piece of context for that is that the Counter-Strike group is at present at one thing of a fever pitch about the potential for a brand new model of the sport (opens in new tab), whether or not meaning CS:GO ported to Valve’s Supply 2 engine or an precise Counter-Strike 2. Valve is remaining silent however, because of some database leaks and claims from some esports figures, followers are definitely huffing the copium: And it seems like loads of them are taking part in CS:GO to take their minds off all of it.
