April 6, 2020 Counter-Strike: Global Offensive has broken yet another record
There doesn’t seem to be any way to stop the growth of Counter-Strike: Global Offence at the minute. Valve’s timeless shooter, which has seen a meteoric rise in its player count over the last couple of months, has broken the all-time record for players yet again, reaching well beyond the one million peak player count.
In the last 30 days alone, CS:GO has pulled in an average player count of 719,313 and a peak player count of 1,228,875 according to Steam Charts, far surpassing anything the game has ever achieved before. The game hit one million peak players for the first time in March, around the time that many countries began imposing stay at home measures to protect people against the spread of coronavirus. This figure, and its continual growth, suggests players are putting their time in self-isolation to good use online.
The game going free-to-play has also contributed to its recent success, attracted new players with casual and competitive game modes.
But while it’s great to see the CS:GO ecosystem flourishing, there is, sadly, a downside. According to Nors3, a sharp increase in the number of VAC bans has been recorded.
Since the game went free-to-play in December 2018, more than 8.8 million accounts have been hit with the ban hammer. Although SteamDB doesn’t track the bans by game, a recent report revealed that new Steam accounts were being set up to play the shooter, so it’s likely a large proportion of those bans correspond to CS:GO. In the last three months alone, more than 1.19 million accounts have been VAC banned.
CS:GO cheats are a real problem, but it’s good to see that despite an increase in negative behaviour, the game continues to thrive.