Counter-Strike lost 400.000 average concurrent players since May

Counter-Strike 2 is rapidly losing players these days. It seems that despite Valve’s best efforts to patch the game, millions of people are not willing to playtest its game and will likely return only in 6-12 months. But by then, other players will be so much better that they will get discouraged.

The second problem has to do with the social element. People form habits and those habits often involve a group of friends. If you play Valorant or Apex Legends for a year and start making friends that you compete with regularly, what are the odds that you will ever come back to CS2, even if it ends up being a much better game?

Because of this, the 400.000 average concurrent players who left Counter-Strike since May this year are probably never coming back. Other might replace them, but Valve’s disastrous launch might have cost them a lot.

CS2 still has more than 700.000 average concurrent players. But that number could fall another 100K or even 200K if things don’t improve quickly.

What is missing

One big problem with CS2 is that it was launched with a lot of technical issues. But for a lot of people, that wasn’t even the biggest problem. What really hurt is that the game came without all the great game modes that people used to enjoy in CS:GO.

All you can play now is Competitive, Deathmatch, and Wingman. For hundreds of thousands of players, those weren’t even their main game modes. For all those players, CS2 no longer has the same appeal as CS:GO.

Valve promised that the game modes beloved by the CS:GO community will be reintroduced. But that could take a long time. Hopefully, by the time CS2 will be 1 year old, all of the old features will be back. But they might not be.

Looking back, Valve should have waited another year to launch CS2. They could have simply not promised anything and used a different approach.

Just look at what Saber Entertainment did in the case of their long-awaited Space Marine 2. The game should have been released months ago. But instead of releasing an unpolished game, the company decided to delay it until the second half of 2024! That would give them almost another year to remove all the bugs and properly implement all the features they promised.

Valve took a different route, and it’s costing them dearly.

Header: Valve