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Counter-Strike 2 reached an all-time high of 1,824,989 players over the weekend, continuing to guide the pack on Steam’s charts. The brand new record is 6,216 players above when Counter-Strike 2 made its debut in 2023. While that increase could appear trivial it is occurring at a time when plenty of free-to-play, or live-service games have ceased development or are within the strategy of being shut down. Based on the Source 2 engine the newest version of Valve’s free-to-play tactical FPS is the fifth iteration within the franchise’s history following the immensely popular Counter-Stike: Global Offensive.
A rough start for players using AMD Radeon GPUs
While the Source 2 engine was released in 2015, and likewise utilized in Dota 2 and Valve’s Half-Life: Alyx VR game, it has continued to receive QoL updates to reap the benefits of modern PC hardware. Nonetheless, many PC users know (and sometimes the identical will be said for console users), that things don’t at all times go as planned with updates and CS2 hit a rough patch after its initial September 2023 release. Shortly after it was reported that players using AMD’s Anti-Lag+ latency-reducing technology were getting banned. Greater than likely this will be attributed to the player count dip seen after the sport’s release. By May of 2024, AMD had managed to update Anti-Lag+, claiming as much as 95% more latency reduction, and renamed it Ati-Lag 2. AMD worked with Valve to integrate the feature into CS2, versus the previous driver implementation, which solved the issue of player bans.
Since then Valve has usually updated CS2 and player counts have mostly continued to rise. Despite its uneven beginnings, the newest game has turn out to be a testament that free-to-play games can still attract huge amounts of players. Last weekend’s surge brought the franchise to a brand new record because it edges closer to the two million mark and while the numbers have dipped a bit, it’s probably only a matter of time until a brand new update or added content causes one other surge of each recent and veteran players.
