Counter-Strike: Global Offensive has been available on Steam for over a decade, but its popularity does not seem likely to wane. The game, in fact, has just set another record, reaching a new all-time peak of over 1,4 million concurrent players.
According to SteamDB, 1,420,183 gamers played Valve’s FPS simultaneously on March 11, highlighting again how active the CS:GO community still is. To make the point, Counter-Strike: Global Offensive is the only game on Steam that has surpassed a 1 Million concurrent players peak in the last 24 hours, and it’s sitting at 931,350 current users at the time we are writing this news, being the most played game right now.
Other popular games, such as Dota 2 and Apex Legends, which occupy the second and third place in the SteamDB chart, stand at 582,750 and 197,562 current players, respectively. The all-time peak record, however, isn’t held by CS:GO and won’t probably be beaten anytime soon. PUBG, in fact, reached an astonishing number of 3,257,248 concurrent players in January 2018, shortly after its 1.0 release on Steam.
CS:GO’s official Twitter account has thanked players for playing the game last weekend, celebrating this new astonishing milestone. Part of this result is probably due to the recent rumors regarding a yet-unannounced Counter-Strike 2.
Thank you to our 1.4M Twitter followers for organizing and playing CS:GO concurrently today.
— CS:GO (@CSGO) March 11, 2023
Many comments under the post, actually, are asking for an official update about this, but Valve has yet to comment on the news. As previously reported, two new executables – ‘csgos2.exe’ and ‘cs2.exe’ – have recently been discovered within NVIDIA drivers. They probably refer to Counter-Strike Global Offensive 2 and Counter-Strike 2, respectively.
According to rumors, a beta for this new project should become available soon. The new Source 2 engine should power the game, improving graphics and performance. We still don’t know whether the new Counter-Strike will be an entirely new game or an update of the current one, but more details should come with the beta mentioned above, should the rumors be confirmed.
This new update would likely lead to significant changes in the competitive scene, as Counter-Strike: Global Offensive is still one of the most popular FPS out there. Tournaments are being held regularly, with huge prizes such as the $850,000 prize pool set for the ESL Pro League, currently being held in Malta with 32 top-tier teams.
Should the rumors about Counter-Strike 2 be confirmed, we will obviously update you.
