CS:GO concurrent player count reaches record high on Steam

Good news for queue times

CS:GO smashed its concurrent player count on Steam once again, with nearly 2 million players queuing up for a match in the FPS game during the weekend of May 6, 2023 (thanks, Eurogamer). It’s the game’s biggest spike since the Covid-19 pandemic, and SteamDB charts suggest CS:GO’s popularity won’t be waning anytime soon.

That speculation might seem like a given, considering Valve announced CS:GO 2, an Overwatch 2-style overhaul of the base game, in March 2023. However, SteamDB’s charts show CS:GO was gradually gaining more players much earlier than that. After a peak in April 2020, when so many were shut inside and desperate for multiplayer games to stay connected with each other, CS:GO lost a few hundred thousand players before settling into a pattern of small peaks and dips.

It hovered around 900,000 for most of 2022 before picking up steam (ha) near the end of the year. The player count has been growing ever since and, as of May 7, 2023, peaked at 1.8 million before settling down toward the end of the day.

Rumors of a CS:GO 2 announcement began circling later in 2022, so perhaps that was all it took to get people interested. It’s especially impressive considering Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2 released around the same time, and Warzone had a substantial update as well.

CS:GO 2 is planned for release in summer 2023, updating the original game with new effects, features, and more. Best of all, it’s a free update for all who own CS:GO.