Anytime you’re talking about the hottest game on Steam, there’s an evergreen unspoken caveat: ‘after Counter-Strike, of course.’ CS2 is unquestionably Steam’s killer app—it has well over a million concurrent players as I write this according to SteamDB, and it’s showing no signs of slowing down. But don’t count out the game it once absorbed and then spat out: its predecessor, Global Offensive.
According to SteamDB, it hit an all-time (post re-release) concurrent player peak just three days ago. That’s a bit more than 68,000 simultaneous terrorists and counter-terrorists. While that’s small potatoes compared to the original game at its peak or CS2 right now—SteamDB appears to only go back to earlier this year when CS:GO un-merged from CS2—it marks a sudden upward trend, a pretty impressive showing for a game you can’t just search up on Steam normally. It’s drawing similar numbers to Deadlock, another (much newer) Valve game you also can’t simply browse for and download.
As the 28th most played game on Steam right now, it’s bigger on the platform than Baldur’s Gate 3, Rainbow Six Siege, Battlefield 6, and all sorts of other blockbusters. It’s no Meccha Chameleon, but not shabby for a game that’s 14 years old, and interesting to note that it’s growing beyond the initial hype it attracted back when the standalone version was first restored earlier this year.
It seems like further evidence of what PC Gamer’s Andy Chalk observed in his story back then: that this town is, in fact, big enough for two Counter-Strikes. It’s honestly big enough for much more than that: the original Counter-Strike and Source both have healthy playerbases of their own all these years later, and that’s to say nothing of similar games that aren’t even on Steam like Valorant. The landscape for tactical FPS is as diverse as I can remember, and that remains true if you only play games with “Counter-Strike” in the title.