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.

Angel Kicevski July 5, 2026

113 1 minute read

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 is a team-based multiplayer first-person shooter developed by Valve and Hidden Path Entertainment. Two teams, Terrorists and Counter-Terrorists, compete in objective-based rounds across various game modes including bomb defusal, hostage rescue, and deathmatch. The game features an economy system where players purchase weapons and equipment at the start of each round based on performance in previous rounds. Competitive matchmaking, community servers, and a robust skin trading ecosystem support a large active player base.