There’s just no stopping Counter-Strike these days. After last month sawCS:GOshatter its three-year record for concurrent players on Steam, Counter-Strike: Global Offensive has once again broken its record, and this time it did it by over 50,000 players.
According toSteamDB, the new concurrent player record for CS:GO is now 1,378,447. That’s a big jump over February’s records, which started at1,320,219concurrent players before hitting1,324,800roughly a week later. The new record was made on Sunday, March 5 at 8 AM ET, 1 PM UTC, and 9 PM Hong Kong time. Most games typically break player records when North America wakes up, Europe gets off work, and Asia starts getting ready for bed with a few CS:GO matches. Everyone awake at the same time causes those massive player spikes you see in the SteamDB chart.
Related:Is Counter-Strike: Global Offensive Worth Playing?
Things have calmed down as everyone gets back to work on Monday. Currently, there are a mere 914,000 players on CS:GO, but that still makes the game Steam’s most popular title by far.
The new record comes amidst reports ofa new CS:GO might soon be revealed. There have long been rumors of Counter-Strike: Global Offensive 2 being secretly developed at Valve using the Source 2 engine, but now sources are saying that a beta test is “right around the corner.” One said we might even see it as early as this month. Apparently, development has been going for quite some time, and it’s currently a top priority at Valve. Supporting these reports are datamines from Nvidia’s latest drivers where files with the names “csgos2” and “cs2” were spotted.
However, with such an enormous audience still playing the current CS:GO, it is unknown how many will swap to the new game when it gets announced. Valve will need to incentivize adoption on the new platform, perhaps even offering transfers of player inventories and unlockables to the new game. This is mere speculation, however, as Valve has yet to make any official announcements.
