Over 10 Years After Release – CS:GO Reaches Highest Player Count Ever

CS:GO just reached its all-time concurrent player record, eleven years after its release. Let's see how many players are currently grinding ranks in CS:GO.

CSGO player count
Eleven years after release, CS:GO reached a new player count record. | © Valve

Counter-Strike is probably the most popular shooter game in the world and everyone has heard of it. The current version is called CS:GO and came out in 2012. To this day it has a huge Esports community with amazing tournaments all over the globe, including incredible prize pools. But the game is not only popular among Esports pros, in fact it just hit a new player count record.

CS:GO As Popular As Never Before

According to SteamDB, CS:GO just hit a massive 1.8 million concurrent players on May 6. The previous record was 1.5 million, also set this year (March 2023). This new all-time high makes CS:GO the game with the second-highest all-time concurrent player count on Steam only surpassed by PUBG with a whopping 3.25 million in January 2018.

Steam DB CSGO
Over 1.8 million concurrent users in CS:GO. | © SteamDB

As mentioned before, CS:GO has been released in 2012, so why does it reach these crazy player numbers only now? Well, the most obvious reason for that is the announcement of Counter-Strike 2. CS2 will launch in summer 2023 and come as a free upgrade to CS:GO. Since we didn't get any huge new content for CS:GO in a long time, this announcement got players hyped up.

Also, individual players are already getting invites to test Counter-Strike 2 and it seems that having an active account that shows the owner regularly playing CS:GO, will increase your chances of getting into the limited test.

Are you one of the gamers that helped CS:GO reach its new all-time high? If so, you might be interested in the recently leaked CS2 emotes:

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