CS:GO has smashed its own all-time concurrent user peak yet again

Counter-Strike: Global Offensive (CS:GO) has once again smashed its all-time concurrent PC user peak.

According to SteamDB, CS:GO topped 1.8m concurrent users over the weekend, smashing not only its own simultaneous user record, but cementing itself as one of Steam's biggest-ever games.

With 1,818,773 CS:GO players online at once yesterday, that means only PUBG: Battlegrounds now sports a higher concurrent count – no other game ever released on Steam comes close.

The seminal shooter - which has been around in one form or another for over 20 years at this point - only recently surpassed its own concurrent record, hitting an all-time peak of 1.32 million players last February, breaching 1.4m in March, and then hit 1.5m concurrents at the end of that same month.

Prior to February's then-new record, CS:GO's concurrent user record reportedly stood at 1,308,963 players. But that record was set three years ago, and as you may remember, there was something happening at that time that unexpectedly kept us all indoors. That makes these latest record-breaking user numbers even more impressive.

Rumours of Counter-Strike 2 had been circulating for a while, including a leak earlier this year and a trademark filing, but Counter-Strike 2 was finally - and officially - announced and will launch in summer 2023.

A free upgrade to CS:GO, it will start a new era of the game on Valve's Source 2 engine, which the company promises will mark the "largest technical leap forward in Counter-Strike's history".

We recently reported that Finnish newspaper Helsingin Sanomat is using Counter-Strike to provide Russian players with accurate news on Putin's invasion of Ukraine.

The newspaper created a map in CS:GO to distribute "independent journalism", which launched earlier this week on World Press Freedom Day. The map, based on a war-torn Slavic city, includes a secret room that shows uncensored footage of the Ukraine invasion in Russian.