Former CS:GO pro turned popular streamer Michael ‘shroud’ Grzesiek is back on his old stomping ground with Counter-Strike 2 – and he thinks the game could be “five times” bigger, with some changes to matchmaking.
CS:GO, released in 2012, has maintained its position as the most popular PC shooter for over a decade, despite facing stiff competition from newer releases.
While games like Valorant have posed serious competition for players’ attention, the CS:GO player count has only continued to increase. But, shroud believes it could be even bigger still if Valve makes necessary changes to matchmaking.
In fact, he believes CS2 could average 5 million concurrent players, if Valve can pull it off.
Shroud has high hopes for Counter-Strike 2
One of the big improvements hoped for CS2 is an overhaul to the ranked system in matchmaking. Unlike rival games, CSGO doesn’t have leaderboards, or a system to see how far away you are from the next rank. It’s all hidden.
As a result, many really competitive players use third-party platforms like Faceit, rather than playing Valve’s official matchmaking, Shroud argues that an improvement to this system could see CS become even more popular.
“If CS2 doesn’t work on their matchmaking system and their ranked system, and it’s just the same as [Global Offensive], I’m going to be so upset.
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“It won’t matter because people are still going to play the game anyway, because it’s Counter-Strike, who cares. But CS is in the spot where it could literally take over. Take over everything and everyone. Engulf everything,” shroud explained.
“It could probably have five million players, concurrent, on average,” he concluded.
Right now, CS:GO averages around 800,000 concurrent players, and regularly peaks at around 1.4 million.
There is no doubt that the release of Counter-Strike 2 will be a boost to the player count. But, how big that boost will be, and how long new players will stick around, might depend on features like matchmaking and anti-cheat.
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