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Counter-Strike: Global Offensive hits 1m concurrent players for the first time

Steam breaks its users record again.

Counter-Strike: Global Offensive has hit one million concurrent players for the first time in its history.

Valve's eight-year-old first-person shooter hit an incredible peak of 1,002,031 players today, according to official Steam stats.

Steam game concurrents at the time of publication.

That makes it the most-popular game on Steam by some distance. Valve's MOBA, Dota 2, is currently the second-most popular game on Steam, with a peak of 685,879 players. Battle royale PUBG is in third with 525,462 players.

CS:GO's popularity has been on the rise for some time now, and has broken its all-time peak concurrents figure a number of times in recent months.

Current theories point to the shooter's swelling popularity in China, as well as momentum gained from the move to free-to-play in 2018, coupled with the release of a battle pass in 2019. It seems likely the coronavirus outbreak, which has sparked a wave of self-isolation across the globe, has contributed too as people look for entertainment indoors.

Steam overall is seeing a huge number of users. At the time of this article's publication, 19,650,516 users were online - that's a new record.

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