More than 7 years after its release, Counter-Strike: Global Offensive is breaking its own record and touching new highs. First-person shooter and the viewer-friendly title has broken its previous concurrent player’s peak of 850,485 in March 2016 during MLG: Columbus major finale. Earlier today, CS:GO peaked at 876,575.

.@CSGO has beaten it's all time concurrent players peak, making the new record 876,575 players.



We suspect it might go even higher tomorrow along with Steam itself.https://t.co/ctFAqBuucZ — Steam Database (@SteamDB) February 8, 2020

Counter-Strike: Global Offensive has gained 242,794 players between August 2019 and January 2020. On the other hand, the game went free-to-play and gained 203,446 users in December 2018. CS:GO has undergone major updates from the developers since late 2018. This includes battle royale mode, new operation, custom player models, new knives and skins and cache revamp among others.

The actual justification over the sudden rise cannot be implied, however, no new over-hyped games’ arrival in the store could be one of the reason while decline in popularity of PUBG, Fortnite, Apex Legends and Overwatch could be an x-factor behind CS:GO’s rise.

On the esport side, Counter-Strike is heading towards a healthy competition between tournament organisers – ESL, Flashpoint, BLAST Premier and EPICENTER among others. The diversity of teams not only at the top tier but also below it has strengthened the pillars of CS: GO as a sustainable esport title.