Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, Valve's free to play competitive shooter which also features the newer Danger Zone mode which is like a Battle Royale has today hit over a million players online.
We've seen it hit a few peak player milestones recently, like February where it did it two days in a row. Valve's CS:GO team sent out a Twitter post, which amusingly just said "Thanks a million." which is how we found out.
This is actually the first time it's done it, and it really is a huge milestone considering it's been out since 2012 although it only went free back in 2018. Also, it's only the third game on Steam to ever hit over a million players online with the others being Dota 2 and PUBG.
Counter-Strike: Global Offensive is now the most popular game on Steam, by quite a wide margin too. The next one down is Dota 2 which regularly hits around ~700,000 players, PUBG hits highs of close to that and then nothing else really comes close to the two of them.
As for the actual Steam client, today it also broke another record for concurrent users online at 19,728,027 at time of writing this.
Why is all this happening now? Likely a mixture of many things: CS:GO being a free and easy to access game for many, the CS:GO Battle Pass ending on March 30 and people trying to earn their stars and also the Coronavirus with a lot more people being forced to stay home. Well, it's all theories, we don't know the true cause of course but it's good news for Valve.
Update: A day later on Sunday, March 15 2020, Steam again broke a new record with over 20 million (approx 20,048,416) concurrent users online
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
Duck Hunt-Pr0 14 Mar 2020
Last edited by Duck Hunt-Pr0 on 14 Mar 2020 at 6:49 pm UTC
I wonder how much of it is due to people staying at home to avoid the coronavirus
Btw guys, seriously, do stay at home.
Not feasible for 99% of the working population.
People still play that CS thing? :D
CS is bigger than ever, there's a lot of big national and international championships.
To be fair, I really doubt that there's a FPS better than CS for competitive. Quake Champions have a good scenario, but it's a little bit niche tournament. Maybe if they release a non class based quake, it will become relevant again
Comandante Ñoñardo 16 Mar 2020
@Duck Hunt-Pr0: Yeah this game is absolutely brilliant. And I can say this even as a CS beta 0.1 veteran, after over 20 years I still love this game. Sometimes I hate it, but most of time I love it :D
ShaunRoselt 17 Mar 2020
Btw guys, seriously, do stay at home.
Not feasible for 99% of the working population.
While of course it's not feasible for a large portion of the working population, I'm quite confident many people are doing computer work that could be done at home - a way of work that should get a push by this (if that's good or not is another question).
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