More than seven years after its release, CS:GO is still growing, with Valve’s legendary FPS setting a new record for average players at the end of 2019.
At the close of the decade, CS:GO is stronger than ever, with stats from Steamcharts revealing that the game ended 2019 with the highest number of average monthly players it has seen since its release in August 2012.
Prior to 2019, the highest average players in a single month came in February 2017, which set the bar at 402,385. Since then the game’s popularity has fluctuated, but it wasn’t until August 2019 that a new record was set at 415,097. CS:GO has maintained over 400,000 average players to close out 2019, with the new peak coming in December at 456,701.
The new record comes amid the ongoing Operation Shattered Web, which kicked off in November 2019 and introduced a host of new cosmetics, in-game missions, and for the first time allowed players to select their preferred character model.
It’s also likely that the game is now seeing the fruits of moving to a free-to-play model. The change, which came in December 2018, saw an initial spike in players and may well have laid the foundation for the new records set towards the end of the following year.
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2019 didn’t see a new record for peak concurrent players – that still belongs to April 2016, a month in which both Operation Wildfire and the MLG Columbus Major,which still offered case drops to viewers, took place, with a peak of 850,485.
However, from September to December 2019 the game did hit a peak concurrent number of over 700,000, the highest being December with 767,060. This is the first time that the game has hit a peak over 700,000 in consecutive months since January to April of 2017.
It’s this consistency, along with the new record for average players, which suggest that at nine years old, CS:GO is in a better place than ever before, with players not only picking up the game but playing it consistently over a period of months.
