CS:GO’s 2026 Steam Spike Is Hard to Ignore

SteamDB logged 68,231 concurrent players on July 1, up from roughly 18,000 a week earlier.

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CS:GO's 2026 Steam Spike Is Hard to Ignore

After Counter-Strike 2 took over the spotlight, Counter-Strike: Global Offensive looked like it had been pushed into the background. That changed in March, when Valve brought CS:GO back to Steam as a standalone app, and the older shooter has kept turning up in the conversation since then.

On July 1, SteamDB showed CS:GO hitting 68,231 concurrent players on Steam, and that level held for the following days. A week earlier, the game was sitting at around 18,000 players, which makes the jump look even stranger.

The numbers are still well behind Counter-Strike 2, which sits at 85% positive from 9.7 million reviews and has reached a peak of 1.86 million concurrent players on Steam. CS:GO is doing its own thing, though, with a 96% positive rating from more than 60,000 reviews at the time of writing.

CS2 still owns the bigger crowd by a mile, but CS:GO is clearly not going quietly. Tell us what you think in the comments, and follow us on X, Bluesky, YouTube, Instagram.

Counter-Strike: Global Offensive expands upon the team-based action gameplay that it pioneered when it was launched 19 years ago. CS: GO features new maps, characters, weapons, and game modes, and delivers updated versions of the classic CS content