From Counter-Strike 1.6 in 2000 to Global Offensive in 2012, Valve’s first-person shooter has thrived. Since the seminal FPS’s launch in 2000, the developers have stuck to their guns over the past 20 years and continue to iterate on the same familiar recipe.
The game has seen an upward trajectory in terms of player base in the past eight years, recording an all-time high in April 2020 during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.
Since transitioning to a free-to-play model in December 2018, CS:GO has gained hundreds of thousands of new players, jumping from a peak of 546,031 players to 746,548 in just one month. That number continued to rise in the months and years that followed.
In March 2020, CS:GO reached the 1,000,000 player mark for the first time. The next month, the game pulled in an average player count of 719,313, peaking at 1,228,875 concurrent players according to Steam Charts. At the time, the U.S. and many countries around the world imposed lockdowns to prevent the spread of the coronavirus.
Since peaking in 2020, CS:GO has continued to pull in around 1,000,000 players every month. In February 2021, last month, the game peaked at 1,123,485 concurrent players. That number increased in March, gaining 2,810 new players and peaking at 1,198,581 concurrent players.
Source: https://dotesports.com/counter-strike/news/how-many-people-playing-csgo
