CS2 has finally managed to surpass its predecessor, Global Offensive, by cracking its all-time player record with 1.825 million concurrent players. Valve’s flagship shooter continues to rise in popularity, though some players think foul play is present and that CS2 might not be all that great.
Counter-Strike 2 set the new concurrent player record on the Ides of March with 1,824,989 people clocking in to play Valve’s shooter, SteamDB shows. This was in the making for a while now as CS2‘s player pool continuously rose over the past few months, picking up the pace again after a slowdown by the game’s less-than-stellar state on release. However, while many players are rejoicing that Counter-Strike still very much has life left in it, not everyone seems to be happy, especially the dedicated CS:GO players who are now crying foul play and saying that it’s bots, not real people, fuelling CS2‘s numbers.
“Yeah, these CS2 fanboys are really annoying, those aren’t player numbers, those are bot numbers to farm cases,” wrote one user in a post to the CS2 subreddit which called folks to celebrate this new milestone. “So you mean all-bot record,” another wrote, with many parroting the same sentiment.
What is undoubtable, however, is that Counter-Strike 2 has never had more players. Its activity graphs are stable and do not fluctuate wildly as opposed to games that actually do have a majority of bots in them, such as PAYDAY 3 and Team Fortress 2. While bots are an issue present in CS2, their impact isn’t all too great compared to the sheer number of actual people playing the title.
One side of CS2, however, truly remains problematic—cheaters. Without a good anti-cheat, even these new millions of players will eventually be driven away from the game. So, to keep the ball rolling, Valve—please fix.
Published: Mar 15, 2025 01:32 pm