Counter-Strike lost 300K average concurrent players since June

It seems that the boom experienced by Counter-Strike in the first half of 2023 is not going to last. Unless, of course, Valve manages to fix the major bugs and bring back some of the great features of CS:GO, including but not limited to most of the game modes.

CS2 has received a lot of criticism. It’s clear that people were expecting much more from it. After years of development, launching a game full of bugs and unpleasant mechanics is a bit disappointing. And it’s not just s1mple and ropz who feel uneasy about the new experience. Much of the community feels the same way.

A quick look at Counter-Strike’s recent reviews on Steam shows that the game received a 61% approval rating. And we’re talking about 119.000 reviews! CS:GO used to have an approval rating of 90%.

If things don’t change for the better and quickly, Valve will likely be forced to make CS:GO available again and just keep both games active until CS2 has been polished enough to be not just playable but also enjoyable.

I can clearly tell that if you want to become CS2 pro you still have 3 months, don’t play this shit game rn, wait for updates

— Sasha (@s1mpleO) October 5, 2023

The player base

By the end of the CS:GO era, Counter-Strike had a player base of around 20 million. That number probably went down by around 25%. In May this year, CS had 1.1 million average concurrent players and hit a peak of 1.8 million concurrent players. The numbers looked phenomenal.

Now, the game has 791.000 average concurrent players and the peak is 1.36 million. It’s not hard to tell that something is wrong. If s1mple, who is the best CS:GO player in the history of the game, decided to take a break because he no longer wanted to deal with the issues, it’s obvious that Valve messed up a bit.

A quick solution would be for them to bring back CS:GO and offer players the option to play both games. Even if only several hundred thousand players choose to play CS2, that’s more than enough to find and fix all the bugs. That approach would probably make a lot of people happy.

Of course, it’s hard to predict what the community would do if both games were available. But there simply isn’t another option if the current trends continue. This isn’t a situation where the game is almost finalized and only a handful of problems remain to be solved. The problems are numerous and they’re not small either.

Header: Valve