Eleven years later, CS:GO is more popular than ever.

There have already been several monumental weekends just in 2023 for Counter-Strike: Global Offensive. The game, which turns 11 later this year, is seeing more popularity than ever before.

Maybe it's the hype surrounding the BLAST.tv Paris Major 2023 or for IEM Dallas 2023 later this month. Maybe it's because Valve launched the Paris 2023 Viewer Pass and autograph capsules this week. Maybe it's because people are getting more excited for Counter-Strike 2.

Perhaps people just really like playing Counter-Strike.

Whatever the reason, Counter-Strike: Global Offensive has been pulling in record high player counts repeatedly over the past several months. Today, Counter-Strike: Global Offensive hit a new, all-time concurrent player peak of 1,818,773 players. This is almost three times as many players as the second most played game on Steam in the past 24 hours, Dota 2.

These numbers can be seen via SteamDB. Today's 1.8M+ peak smashes the old concurrent player record, which was around 1,507,000 that was set about a month ago. To put it another way: If Counter-Strike were a nation, a CS-Nation as it were, it would be around the 149th most populous nation in the world.