Counter-Strike: Global Offensive is 11 years old but has never been more popular

gamesradar.com:

Counter-Strike: Global Offensive may be more than a decade old, but it's currently the most popular game on Steam right now.

In fact, despite releasing over 11 years ago, it seems CS:GO has never been more popular; the shooter has just broken its own concurrent user record - the term given to the number of players logged into a game all at the same time - clocking up a staggering 1,320,219 simultaneous users over the weekend. 

According to SteamDB (opens in new tab) - and spotted by our friends over at PC Gamer (opens in new tab) - that's the highest concurrent peak the shooter has ever had, smashing the previous record of 1,308,963, which was set back during the first pandemic lockdown.

Steam records are usually broken at times when lots of us are off work or stuck at home, which means we often see these records broken during holiday periods or on weekends.

Steam's upward trend began three years ago, in January 2020, when the world began to self-isolate at the start of the COVID-19 crisis. On February 2, Steam's existing record of 18,537,490 users – set in January 2018 – was surpassed (opens in new tab), smashing the existing record by an impressive 300,000 to peak at 18,801,944 players. 

It's gone on to be broken several times since, though, including a weekend in March 2020 that saw numbers breach 20 million for the first time (opens in new tab). We then saw 24.7 million users peak in December 2020 (opens in new tab), 26.5 million in February 2021 (opens in new tab), and at the end of October, the PC platform topped 30 million users on the platform (opens in new tab) at once for the very first time.

In November 2022, Steam smashed its own record of the highest number of concurrent players recorded online - not once,