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CS:GO’s average player count just hit an all-time high

Steam Charts suggests that the game saw a new average player count record yesterday

Valve’s multiplayer FPS Counter-Strike: Global Offensive has seen a big turnout of players over the last month. According to Steam Charts, it appears that over the last 30 days the game has seen a new average player count record, with the highest number posted since the game’s release.

Steam Charts, a site which tracks videogames’ concurrent player numbers on the platform, gives the average CS:GO player numbers for each month, going back to the game’s Steam release in summer 2012. While average player numbers have sat somewhere between 350-400k for most of this year, they’ve now hit an all-time high – as spotted by Dot Esports, over the last 30 days (at the time of writing), the figure on the CS:GO Steam Charts page is at 417,553.7, a new record.

The number follows two more months of player count increases for the game, with August and September seeing around 415k and just under 411k respectively. That’s a lot of CS:GO.

It’s not completely clear why CS:GO’s seeing an increase in average player numbers, but it’s likely that the Counter-Strike esports tournament, the StarLadder Berlin Major, which took place late August and into September, could have contributed to the rise. As Dot Esports points out,  one of the game’s fan-favourite maps ‘Cache’ is back in some of the game’s modes as of this month, which could also be getting players excited to jump in.

It’s worth noting, though, that this hasn’t yet meant a new high number of peak players – the reigning record for that still seems to belong to April 2016, which saw a peak of over 850k players.

Steam Charts indicates that the average player counts this year so far have overall been pretty high, and while it’s not confirmed, this could potentially tie into the fact that the game became free-to-play in December last year, which at the time saw its concurrent player counts rocket, following the Danger Zone update.