https://steamcharts.com/app/730

CSGO has been stat tracked on SteamCharts since July 2012, after going F2P the game is at it's - frankly - voluminous resurgence that is dwarfing any other FPS game on Steam and I imagine the world including China... nearly a decade after it was released in it's current iteration and almost two decades since the original CS appeared in November 2000.

The million concurrent player barrier was broken by CSGO in March 2020. No other game on Steam has ever had 1,000,000 players at once. TF2 is also free and is nowhere near this successful.

It's safe to say Counter Strike has emerged victorious above all other FPS games from the annals of Doom and Quake, to the modern day contemporaries such as CoD and Halo.

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After reviewing for grammatical and consistency errors, I forgot about Fortnite - disregard everything I said.

1 million people playing what is basically a 20 year old game at 10:17am on a lazy Sunday? That's nothing. How many Travis Scott concerts has CSGO had?

Gotta give credit where credit is due

I don't really follow or care much about neither Fortnite nor Travis Scott, but that event looked really cool.

I still regularly play CS after 20 years, though when i say "play" i mean 10 seconds into a match my brain realises i'm playing CSGO again and shuts down to 10% to protect itself, and for some reason my friends continue to invite me.
I'm very good at COD so i know i'm not too old to do well, but i've played so f***ing much of CSGO i get instantly bored and start messing around, i need a new version of the game to re-ignite my interest, change up the weapons, reimagine the maps, add a skateboard i don't know, but there's no reason to do that if the game is doing so well.
I had an idea to convert some of the classic hostage maps to bomb maps just so people see them again, that would be interesting... anything besides skins would be interesting...

That's cool. Is there anything new and exciting about CS:GO that gets players to come back?

According to that Steamcharts link, CSGO never averaged a million players but it has peaked above a million reasonably often.

Sort of, but the thing about CSGO is that Dust 2 is a really, really, really good map. And I guess Mirage is OK.

Jokes aside, I've seen some new maps here and there, they've thrown in some game modes over the years (Flying Scoutsman, that battle royale thing they made for it), but really CSGO has the amazing advantage of being extremely easy to pick up and play while also having a really high skill ceiling. It doesn't need an upgrade or skins treadmill to keep people coming back because the game itself is just that much fun to play.

I also think that the presence of simple Deathmatch and Gun Game-type modes helps a lot. There's no bullshit to either of these, no classes to customize, no skins to mess with, no fluff, just click on Arms Race and go.

I think that the prevalence of Dust 2 and like two or three other maps really is the game's worst aspect, though. Listen, I know Dust 2 is really well designed and I can appreciate that, but variety is the spice of life and playing the same map infinitely gets old. Thankfully, you can deselect Dust 2 from your matchmaking, but wait times for most other maps is sometimes a little long.

Since i'm here again i feel compelled to add that CrossFire was last year reported to have 6 million concurrent players, which is crazy considering it's barely known in the west, there are 46 people currently watching it on Twitch compared to CS:GO's 80k.
They apparently made a tv series about it in China, Sony Pictures are currently making a movie, and Remedy are making the next iteration on consoles, in 2018 it was one of the top five highest grossing video games alongside Fortnite, League of Legend and Pokemon Go.

I missed this thread originally and since it popped up figure I'd throw my thoughts out.

I got into CS late in it's cycle, maybe 2016 or so. However when I got in, I got SUPER in. It helped I had a solid group to play with but eventually I started playing solo queue. Got into the esports scene with it, all that. I still don't use utility that much just because I don't have time to practice/memorize lineups at this point in my life.

I of course went over to Valorant when that released, and as a game I prefer that. I like the style, the agents, the guns, etc. But MAN is the player base TOXIC. Like I'll have toxic teammates in CS of course, but they will at least still try to win. Valorant came out at the perfect time where everyone was bored and it was the "cool" thing to troll people online. Like, they can call me names, yell, what ever, but say SOMETHING in voice chat....haha.

That said, I always come back to CS. It's simple, so it won't really attract a lot of new players, but to me it will always be the perfect competitive video game. The skill ceiling is high, but has floors along the way that are easy to work towards to become decent. The current comp maps in rotation are all really good(except Nuke cuz f that map lol). I'm sure they'll put out another iteration at some point, but for now I don't think it will ever go away. Now if only we could get official 128 tick servers.....

it's bonkers to me that CS is as popular as it is. i got into CS in 2001 - 2002, and played it on and off for a good 5 or 6 years. i've played CSGO a few times but never got into it as much as i did CS/CS:Source