Despite its age, the game known by many as CS:GO has attracted more players than ever before.

Released on August 21, 2012, Counter-Strike: Global Offensive is no child of today. Valve’s game is more than ten years old, but on February 11, 2023, it didn’t even consider age, as it beat its concurrent player count on Steam (1,308,963), which had climbed from 1.3 million to 1.32 million. This is an outstanding success for the Counter-Strike franchise, which has been around since 1999, even though the game started as a Half-Life mod, and its success got Valve’s attention: it bought the rights and hired one of the co-creators to make a standalone game. The result was Counter-Strike 1.0, now more than 23 years old…

Counter-Strike: Global Offensive’s official Twitter description is apt: “your favorite first-person shooter’s favorite first-person shooter.” Because CS:GO takes features from older games while still being able to stay completely faithful to the basics (five terrorists would plant a bomb on a map, and five counter-terrorists would have to prevent it), the game didn’t start in good shape and went through significant changes over the first few years. That’s how microtransactions came into the game so that you can spend $400 on a knife, for example, and let’s not forget that the idea was first conceived as a console port.

Today, it’s one of the most popular competitive FPSes, and it’s often one of the most-played games on Steam. Of course, the price has a big part to play in this. There isn’t any, as it’s free-to-play, so you can find it on Steam at any time and start shooting down counter-terrorists or taking out terrorists on the other side. With Valve recently making moves around Team Fortress 2, perhaps Gabe Newell and his team have remembered that supporting their old, successful games is essential.

Source: PCGamer