Details for CSGO, which managed to break the record despite 7 years, are in the article.
Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, abbreviated as CS GO, was released in 2012. While some games regressed over time as players moved on to new games, CSGO continued to grow and increase its player base. The overall Steam stats page shows that CSGO has reached a new all-time high concurrent player peak. Following CSGO 's MLG Columbus tournament on Sunday, February 9, it hosted more than 901,000 concurrent players, surpassing a record 850,485 in April 2016 and soon after, according to official sources.
For comparison, CSGO had more than 250,000 concurrent players on February 9 from DOTA 2 , the number 2 game developed by Valve , which is also free to play . CSGO 's concurrent player counts are very high and set a new record for the game itself, but PUBG still holds the record for highest total simultaneous player counts. The battle royale game had a staggering 3 million concurrent players during the height of its popularity in 2018. It is not yet clear why CSGO 's player count has increased recently . On the other hand, Valve recently released CSGO' with a new feature, targeting people who abuse in-game chat. Players who receive "significantly more abuse reports" than other players will receive a warning. If they ignore the warning, they are automatically muted. They will remain silent until they earn enough XP to lift the speaking ban, but during this time other players can choose to unmute them.
