CS:GO Tops 1.1 Million Concurrent, Had 24 Million Overall Players In February

Despite being eight years old, Counter-Strike: Global Offensive is more popular than ever. Going free-to-play has certainly helped with that, as has everyone's tendencies to stay at home during the COVID-19 crisis, but even without taking that into account, CS:GO has been rising steadily since for the past year, even as some new competition comes to light.

SuperData is reporting that Valve's shooter had 24 million unique players in the month of February, its highest total ever. SuperData attributes the uptick to "An update to the game in late November 2019, which featured a battle pass and cosmetic character skins."

Steam Charts seems to back up the assertion that CS:GO is really, really popular right now. Its 24-hour peak is just over 1.1 million players, which also represents its all-time peak, and you can see that the game's average number of players per month has been steadily rising since October.

SuperData questions whether CS:GO's newfound success will be sustainable, considering the recent release of Call of Duty: Warzone and the impending launch of Riot's Valorant. Warzone isn't really in the same boat, genre-wise, so I don't think it will have a major impact, and Valorant is still several months away, at least, so Valve should have at least a little while to enjoy its newfound success.