Counter-Strike 2 shadow dropped at the very end of September, forcing players to jump ship as it replaced CS:GO. Clearly, not everyone was on board with the move, since it lost 184,658 players in October. That's 18.92 percent of the player base, making it the biggest drop-off since the game launched in 2012.

In September, it had an impressive average player count of 976,138, just shy of one million (though the peak player count still reaches that number every month). CS2's launch didn't have the desired effect. Rather than seeing an influx of new players, interest dropped, and there are a lot of possible factors as to why.

Achievements were cut entirely, there are plenty of new bugs (like the Michael Jackson leaning and broken knife damage), community servers lost support, peekers have an unfair advantage, modes like Danger Zone were removed, maps got axed, and the new ranking system isn't proving popular. There are a lot of problems right now.

CS2 has lost 184,000 players in the past month, or 18.92% of the player base, the highest percentage lost since October 2012
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Of course, this doesn't mean we need to ring the doomsday bells and prepare for the death of Counter-Strike. It's still an immensely popular game reaching staggering peak player counts of over one million. But the drop-off in average player count does show that CS2 wasn't the hit it was shaped up to be.

However, it's not the first sharp decline this year. Between June and July, it lost 204,000 players, going from an average of 1,085,966 to 881,690. However, that was a loss of 18.81 percent of the player base, just a smidge less than October. It'll no doubt recover, especially once bug fixes and updates roll out, bringing back the lost CS:GO content that didn't make it to Source 2.

For the time being, the community isn't happy with the current state of the game. Many have sworn it off and found their FPS fix elsewhere, some have even sold their inventories, and others have simply lost interest.

When the limited test got dropped to nearly everyone, I hopped on the hype train and it lasted until early October. Game is in a shit state. What alienated me the first time was cheaters and 64 tick and well, things haven’t improved too much with CS2’s release.

Counter-Strike still has yet to come close to October 2012's drop. Back then, it lost 32.88 percent of the player base. But that was only a loss of 5,261 average players, rather than the 180,000 we saw last month.

Granted, it quickly got them back in November with an increased average player count of 31.61 percent. Maybe Counter-Strike 2 will pull off something similar.

Posted: Nov 05, 2023 12:51 pm
Related Forum: PC Gaming Forum

Source: https://www.thegamer.com/counter-strike-2-biggest-player-drop-since-2012/