Hogwarts Legacy player count on PC almost enough to claim Steam's throne

If it weren’t for those meddling first-person shooter kids

After convincing pre-order sales and a peak of over half a million players for its early access phase, which coincided with breaking some Twitch viewership records, Hogwarts Legacy’s player numbers continued to reach new heights on the first weekend after its official launch.

SteamDB recorded 879,309 Hogwarts Legacy players between February 12 and 13, 2023. This would have been enough to claim the throne on PC’s most important store platform on most other weekends.

However, Counter-Strike: Global Offensive surged to a new record over the last couple of days, reaching a player count of 1,320,219 to deny the magical open-world RPG from sitting on top. Not only did the most important esports tournament on CS:GO’s competitive calendar reach its climax over the weekend, but Valve also released some new cosmetics recently.

Since CS:GO is the only game on Steam with unregulated trades, farm bots tend to run wild whenever new items are added to the game. That adds a bit of an asterisk to CS:GO’s newest record, since we can’t distinguish those bots from actual players. Aside from that, the classic first-person shooter’s player count has been on the rise steadily for months now, so this might simply be a case of many aspects coming together to lead to a breakthrough.

Hogwarts Legacy sits on 93% positive reviews on Steam as of the time of writing. You can find our own Hogwarts Legacy review here. If you already own the game, you should check the best Hogwarts Legacy PC settings and seek out our Hogwarts Legacy walkthrough for anything you might want to know about progressing through the game.