CS:GO sees highest-ever player count – Steam can’t handle it
CS:GO, more like CS:OH NO! Our servers are overloaded.
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Steam is easily the largest hub for PC gaming, with millions of players flocking to Steam to play their favorite games. In the month of March 2023, 1.51 Million of those players were on CS:GO and the servers are starting to suffer with this large boost in player count.
CS:GO sees highest-ever player count
On Monday, March 27th, CS:GO saw a player count of 1,519,457 players according to SteamDB, that’s a lot of players considering the metric for total players online is around 30 million a day, and between 8-10 million in-game. Pretty impressive, considering how long the game has been around and the fact the CS2 update is on the way. But all of these players are causing a stir in the server department.
It’s important to note that Valve created CS:GO and it is also Valve that runs Steam, so that means that naturally CS:GO gets a lot of love and attention from Vlave, however, the cracks are starting to show.
The announcement and play-testing of CS2 (Counter-Strike 2) undoubtedly have had a massive part to play in the rise of CS:GO players, as CS2 promises to bring CS:GO into modern times with a plethora of graphical and QOL updates. Beta testing of CS2 was handed out seemingly at random, with players receiving invites on the CS:GO home screen, so a lit of the traffic we are seeing is players leading to the game to see if they have been invited to the beta.
Not only have more players been playing CS:GO, but the economy has been given a healthy boost, as one of the primary selling points of CS2 was its graphical updates and “how good the skins look”. Some of the Items on the Steam Market (such as cases) have risen from around 10p to £1.44. So a lot of users have poured onto Steam to try and sell some accumulated cases for some sweet Steam wallet funds.
Steam can’t handle the number of concurrent CS:GO players
We have reported the issues that the CS:GO services have been facing a few times over the last few weeks. It’s safe to say that there have been far more issues than normal. And it’s not just the CS:GO, multiplayer servers that are having issues, it’s the Steam inventory services too.
According to Steam Status, the unofficial service checker for Steam, the CS:GO servers, and inventory servers are almost always at critical mass. Afcorse, this is dependent on the time of day, and with the Easter break just ending, we’re obviously going to see a dip in players and strain being taken off servers. If you check this on a weekend, we guarantee you will see at least one of the CS:GO servers at critical.
If Valve isn’t careful, all hell will break loose on Steam when CS2 releases.
There was a recent case of a game breaking Steam, and that was Sons of The Forest. Sons had around 200,000 people racing to purchase the game all at once and it took down Steam for a good hour, nobody could purchase the game, or play it.
All of that happened with a mere 200,000 players, that’s nowhere near the 1.5 Million we can now see playing CS:GO almost daily.
If Steam doesn’t bolster its servers and strengthen its services, we could see one of the biggest Steam outages in history. Steam is already struggling to keep up with the current CS:GO situation.
Final Word
Unfortunately, we are not in any way associated with Valve, so we don’t actually know what goes on inside Valve, or with Steam behind the curtain. We are only speculating on what could be, based on the current happenings with the CS:GO services, and the fact it took far less to take Steam down for an hour in February.
We will continue to bring you all the Steam and CS:GO outages and issues as they present.
