Earlier on February 11th, 1,320,219 people were playing CS:GO simultaneously according to Steam’s own stats. That beats the previous record of 1,308,963 from April 2020. You can see the historic data most easily via SteamDB. I think it would be reasonable to speculate that the peak in April 2020 was prompted in part by a global pandemic increasing player counts across gaming in general. The latest peak is harder to diagnose, although there was an update yesterday which introduced new community-made weapon finished and stickers. Perhaps the final push was a lot of people wanting to get Denzel Curry’s music in-game. The more likely reason is just that CS:GO has been steadily increasing in popularity for months, with previous recent weekends already getting close to breaking the record. As noted above, in a genre of near constant change, Counter-Strike has remained remarkably static for nearly two decades. CS:GO’s innovations came via new competitive ranking, new progression systems, and a handful of new maps, while its modes and arsenal of weapons went mostly untouched. Valve did make a rare tweak to two of its most popular weapons last November. While CS:GO is obviously in rude health, Team Fortress 2’s community have been protesting in recent months due to a lack of support from Valve. Valve announced this past week that they would release a major update for their other team shooter this summer, although the announcement post mostly consists of Valve asking Team Fortress 2’s community to make the update for them.
