Counter-Strike: Global Offensive officially turned 10 years old last year, but, despite its legacy status, the game continues to gain players and bring old ones back – even as Valve goes months without any major updates.
CS:GO has always been exceptionally popular, and as the leading shooter available on Steam, it has always dominated the PC shooter market. Despite increasingly stiff competition, particularly from Riot Games’ Valorant, the game continues to grow.
During lockdowns in 2020, CS:GO reached its highest peak player count of over 1.3 million concurrently, and an average of over 850,000 players at any time.
Since then, the average has held strong at around 600,00, hitting over 700,000 in January 2023. And on Sunday, January 29, a peak of 1.2 million concurrent players was reached, according to data from Steam Charts.
CSGO continues to grow with no updates
Making these numbers even more impressive, they have been achieved with little involvement from Valve. The game has not had any new content added since July 2022, and the last significant update came in November, which just nerfed two weapons and replaced Dust2 with Anubis in the active duty map pool.
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Every CS:GO tweet is filled with replies practically begging for any kind of update that would add some new content to the game, be it a new skin case, some new ways to play, or, for the most optimistic, a new Operation.
Operations are CS:GO’s big events, and the last one was back in September 2021. Over a year later, there is not even a hint that there is anything planned.
Thankfully, CS:GO’s core gameplay is enough to keep players coming back, no matter what. While other PC shooters, like Valorant, Apex Legends, Overwatch and PUBG pump out new content every few months, CS:GO just sits back and watches the player count steadily rise.
This increase in players has also coincided with a lull in professional play. Top teams have just returned the player break, and the next major tournament, IEM Katowice, doesn’t start until later this week. Big tournaments and Majors can increase the player count even further.
