Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, a game that just recently celebrated its 20th anniversary, has hit a new milestone. Valve’s 5-on-5 first-person shooter game has gone through a few iterations, but the 20-year-old game is still seeing players come out in record numbers. On March 14, CS:GO had over 1M concurrent players, the most ever according to SteamCharts.
As more and more schools and job sites close because of the social distancing protocols put in place because of the novel corona (COVID-19) pandemic, people are looking to gaming, social, and video mediums to pass the time. CS:GO appears to be one of those methods.
However, even before the health concerns regarding the virus were apparent, the number of players was on the rise.
Since January of 2019 CS:GO has seen a 41% increase in the average number of players with the largest jump occurring in 2020 between January and February at 8.54%
Recently the digital distribution platform registered over 19.7M players – the most ever in history, beating the previous mark by just under 1M players.