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:

Lukas Ballat

Lukas has been passionate about shooters his whole life and at EarlyGame he teaches you everything about CoD, while also taking care of campaigns and partner projects. He also plays Souls-likes and doesn't shy away from the Diablo-grind either....