Another concurrent playerbase milestone has been achieved, and once again it’s one of Valve’s own IPs. Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, which is the most current edition of the long running franchise, has just reached 1.8 million players for the first time in its near 11 year history. The numbers were logged via the SteamDB, which is the statistical database for any and all Steam titles and how they perform on daily basis. On top of that, the game became the most played title over the weekend, easily beating out other contemporaries such as Dota 2, Apex Legends, PUBG: Battlegrounds, and Grand Theft Auto V.
Considering that this game regularly competes with all of the other very popular multiplayer titles on the Steam platform, this achievement is nothing short of insane. If you look at the actual top played Steam games list then you’d see an extremely huge variable between the top five titles, with Counter-Strike: Global Offensive standing above all others by a longshot. As we already mentioned, the other four titles showed made their presence on the list with their usual numbers, each within the hundreds of thousands. Still, even with those statistics, they don’t even come close to 1.8 million concurrent players at one time.
This is especially interesting as Valve has just announced the newest entry in the franchise, Counter-Strike 2. The upcoming title will use the Source 2 engine and will feature upgraded graphics, new and special features, and high performance servers. This begs the question, what will happen to Counter-Strike: Global Offensive when Counter-Strike 2 inevitably launches. For the moment it appears that both titles will coexist in the market, which makes sense as the former’s ability to survive this long is mostly due to the company’s continuation of more content and new modes. Counter-Strike 2 is slated to launch sometime in Summer 2023.