CS:GO Breaks Player Count Record Once Again Amid Sequel Rumors

thegamer.com:

There’s just no stopping Counter-Strike these days. After last month saw CS:GO shatter its three-year record for concurrent players on Steam, Counter-Strike: Global Offensive has once again broken its record, and this time it did it by over 50,000 players.

According to SteamDB, the new concurrent player record for CS:GO is now 1,378,447. That’s a big jump over February’s records, which started at 1,320,219 concurrent players before hitting 1,324,800 roughly a week later. The new record was made on Sunday, March 5 at 8 AM ET, 1 PM UTC, and 9 PM Hong Kong time. Most games typically break player records when North America wakes up, Europe gets off work, and Asia starts getting ready for bed with a few CS:GO matches. Everyone awake at the same time causes those massive player spikes you see in the SteamDB chart.

Related: Is Counter-Strike: Global Offensive Worth Playing?

Things have calmed down as everyone gets back to work on Monday. Currently, there are a mere 914,000 players on CS:GO, but that still makes the game Steam's most popular title by far.

The new record comes amidst reports of a new CS:GO might soon be revealed. There have long been rumors of Counter-Strike: Global Offensive 2 being secretly developed at Valve using the Source 2 engine, but now sources speaking to developers say a beta test is "right around the corner." One said we might even see it as early as this month. Those sources said development has been going for quite some time and it’s currently a top priority at Valve. Supporting these reports are datamines of Nvidia's latest drivers where files with the names "csgos2" and "cs2" were spotted.

However, with such an enormous audience still playing the current CS:GO, it is unknown how many will swap