CS: GO just shattered its pandemic record for Steam concurrent players

Pew pew, but 1.3 million times

Counterstrike: Global Offensive (CS: GO) set a new record for Steam concurrent players over a decade after the FPS game’s original release, shattering even its pandemic high (thanks, PC Gamer). CS: GO hit its new record of 1,320,219 on Feb. 11, 2023, and while the numbers have come down since – at the time of writing, the concurrent count is 995,462 – the player total is still remarkably high for a multiplayer game that released in 2012.

The last time CS: GO broke its own player record was in 2020, after the start of Covid-19 lockdowns. The impetus behind more people playing a cooperative multiplayer game isn’t hard to figure out there, but there’s no apparent reason for the sudden spike now. Valve hasn’t published any substantial new updates for the game in years. CS: GO is still very much the same game it was when it first launched, albeit with more stability and fewer bugs.

A glance at the SteamCharts website shows a steady dropoff throughout most of 2021, before a gradual gain in player numbers a few months at a time in 2022. The last big drop was in September and October, but even when the battle royale Warzone 2 released in November, CS: GO gained several thousand new players.

Perhaps the winter blues drove folks online to play together once more. Whatever the reason, if you’re keen on jumping into CS: GO again or for the first time, there’s certainly plenty of people to team up with for a quick match.