Gaming

Is CSGO Dead?

September 16, 2020287

Is CSGO dead? How many players play it daily? Will the number increase or decrease? What about support from the developers? Find out here!

CS:GO, or Counter-Strike: Global Offensive is based on the tried and tested formula of a successful first-person shooter. Started with a mod for Half-Life, Counter Strike has been improving ever since. But is CSGO dead now?

Table Of Contents hide

1. Daily Player Count

2. Twitch View Count And Trend

2.1. Valorant vs. CSGO viewers

3. Updates and Support

4. Conclusion

Daily Player Count

As you can see from the graph above, CS:GO has an average player count of 400,000 at any instance of time. To put these numbers into perspective, games like PUBG and DOTA 2 have an average player count of 150,000 and 300,000 at any given time. If you want to compare peak player amount per 24 hours in the last 30 days then both games fall short by 300,000 or more. This is a huge achievement for a game that has been out for over 7 years.

CS:GO reached its peak player count in April 2020 and the following months have not decreased much since it still gets close to a million players at a time every day! That’s not a player count a dead game can put up.

Twitch View Count And Trend

Twitch being one of the leading platforms to stream games and gather all gamers is an excellent way to determine if a game is relevant based on the viewers count. CSGO ranks in the top 5 games in terms of twitch viewers at any given time. The graph shows the last 6 months of CS:GO viewers in twitch. It seems like the graph has many spikes which is quite expected because one of the main reasons this game has stayed relevant is due to the constant ESports tournament hosted.

Since twitch is the main place for players to watch the live tournaments of their favorite teams, at most cases spikes represent tournaments. If we pick the lowest time considering it as no major tournaments were hosted then, CS:GO still maintains over 50,000 viewers which is a very respectable amount.

Valorant vs. CSGO viewers

Let’s compare it to its direct rival Valorant. The graph represents the time of launch of Valorant which boasts over 700,000 at its peak. After the release, Valorant has spiraled downwards to be neck on neck with CS:GO. CS:GO in comparison has kept a steady flow of viewers and has become more relevant in the past month by a slight decrease of twitch viewers in Valorant.

This graph can also tell us if Valorant has had its effects on CSGO. Since CSGO charts have not had major dips we can conclude that Valorant certainly has not had any major effect on CSGO viewers. However, in the future, this can change when Valorant hosts major tournaments.

By looking at deteriorating numbers of Valorant from the graph, Is Valorant Dead?

Updates and Support

Competition is always good for the consumers. When Valorant started getting popular, Valve started updating CSGO and adding balance to the game. Since it’s their cash cow, Valve has continued to support CSGO intensively to prevent it from dying.

They have introduced a new anti-cheat system recently to avoid external drives and applications without proper digital signature to interact with the game. Updates roll out almost every week and sometimes even more than once which fixes various bugs, improves maps and introduces new features.

Conclusion

CSGO is certainly not dying and it will not anytime soon. Constant tournaments, rumors of game redesign in a new source, player controlled markets in CSGO and the value of ownership of different weapon skins makes people want to keep coming back to the game. No other shooter games can rival CSGO’s shooting mechanics yet. Looking at the numbers, CSGO will not decrease its player base and possibly increase with the influx of reference of new players added by the pandemic.