CS2 Is Gaining Steam

CS2 was officially released on September 27, 2023. Back then, the game’s community was rapidly shrinking. The game lost almost 19% of its player base in the first month alone, going from 976.000 average concurrent players down to 792.000 average concurrent players.

In the following month, the community experienced another 10% decline, reaching just 714.000 average concurrent players. Over the next three months, CS2 started to grow again and stabilized at around 770.000 average concurrent players. But everyone was convinced that the players who left would not be coming back.

Why The CS2 Community Is Growing Again

In recent months, we’ve seen the CS2 community growing rapidly once again. Right now, the game is at 921.000 average concurrent players, with a peak number of 1.61 million. The question is: why?

There are three main reasons for this:

The CS2 Esports Scene

📢 Over 1.528M Concurrent Viewers for @FaZeEsports vs @natusvincere, placing PGL Major Copenhagen 2024 in the Top 3 most popular @CounterStrike events of all-time.

LIVE #PGLMajor stats:
🔗 https://t.co/g9iU9dhYnT pic.twitter.com/x1Uo1IQD2o

— Esports Charts 🇺🇦 (@EsportsCharts) March 31, 2024

In March 2024, CS2 had its first Major ever and people were genuinely excited to watch it. More than 1.85 million tuned in during the Grand Final, and most of the other playoffs matches had around 1 million viewers at their peak. These are great numbers for an esport like Counter-Strike 2 and they clearly indicate that the game has a dedicated fan base.

With so many people watching and reconnecting to their hobby, it was inevitable that some of them would return to playing it.

The Game’s Improvement

When it was first released, CS2 was full of bugs. The game was a complete disappointment for a lot of people, including some of the world’s most famous players, such as s1mple. Because it missed a lot of important features and was overall buggy, many players decided to quit for a while and enjoy games like Valorant instead.

But as the game got better and better, those people started to realize that they could safely return and experience the latest version of Counter-Strike in all its glory.

In a recent interview with Spinx, he said that in his view, the game has improved a lot since its release. Despite not being perfect and still having some issues to fix, it offers a totally different experience.

The Return of S1mple

S1mple isn’t just another CS2 player. He is still widely regarded as one of the best CS players of all time and his departure from the game influenced many. When he returned, the impact was similar.

The fact that someone like him was now relatively happy with the state of CS2 indicated that Valve had done a good job at patching the game and making it enjoyable again.

Header: Valve