CS:GO Player Statistics Recap

CS:GO was officially released in 2012 and started out in August with a rather small playerbase of 15k active players. The peak in that month was around 50k though, because a lot of players of the older iterations of Counter-Strike were curious to check out the new game. At that time there was kind of a competition between CS:S - the game right before CS:GO - and CS 1.6, the all time classic. CS 1.6 was a legendary game and although CS:S attracted a decent amount of new players in its era, the oldschool 1.6 players weren't to convinced about the quality of the game. That also had an effect on the CS:GO release, because players - especially competitive players of 1.6 - were sceptical if this new game would fulfill their expectations. As you can see in the graph, that affected CS:GO so much, that the average player count in the first year was almost stagnant. So something had to be done about this:

First Operation and Skins

So in 2013 the first Operation got released: Operation Payback. That was a huge success and by the end of it, it had a turnover of $150k. Right after that, Operation Bravo got released that contained new maps, a new case and a new collection. So skins made their way into the game in 2013. All of this effort was visible in the player count, which had a substantial grow in 2013 to around 50k average players.

Majors

In 2014 there already was a decent hype around the game. With the Cologne Major being a huge success as well, the player count rose even further so by the end of 2014 it was at around 180k average players.

The Years after

CS:GO saw constant updates and new operations, altough they weren't as frequent anymore. A lot of new skins got patched into the game and a global economy with huge success was built around it. The player count also rose pretty consistent over the years, as can be seen in the graph above. In March 2020 CS:GO reached the magical milestone of a peak player count that is above 1 Million players.

This year in May even the average player count rose to >1 Million players which is also a huge milestone. That is mainly because CS2, CS:GOs successor got announced and a limited playtest got released.

We can say that we are absolutely hyped on what might come with the new game and which milestones will be reached in the future.