The popularity of Counter-Strike: Global Offensive and its alternatives
So I get two questions from my friends frequently asked me "Is CS: GO dying out? What other games could we play?" and "Is there anything else we can play other than CSGO?"
With the recent release of competitor Valorant from riot games, the CS: GO community has wondered if they will
either need to move over to Valorant or find an alternative game to play. So a good way to measure this would be to look at how the player count for CS: GO overtime.
So here is a plot of the average number of concurrent players per month since the game's release.
So from here, we can tell that over time the game has been increasing in popularity until mid-2015 when it plateaus off at around 350k players, it then started to increase
again in November 2019 when the covid-19 pandemic started this caused a massive spike in players as lockdowns across the world started to be implemented. The later release
of competitor Valorant from Riot games then caused player count to go down for a few months before returning to similar numbers.
So it seems the player base for this game has been increasing in popularity and even though the release of Valorant caused a decrease in player base it was temporary and
only by a small amount of around 50k. So player count has been relatively constant through 2016-2019 with the sudden increase in 2020 and a slight decrease in 2021. Let's now look at how other
popular games are doing as a whole to see what alternatives there are.
Conclusion
The player base of CS: GO stays healthy for now but it would be a good idea to play some other games and explore other options so that we can get a general feel of the gameplay if the game was
to lose its player base. Some alternatives on steam are PubG, Team Fortress 2, Rainbow Six and Warframe as these are FPS shooters.