CS:GO Player Gain Declines for 6 Consecutive Months for the First Time in History

The CS:GO community has had a lot to complain about the game especially when it came to the online competitive scene, which was getting too monotonous for the majority of the viewers. The recently concluded IEM Cologne 2021, which was the first CS:GO LAN tournament in more than a year was a welcome change, registering a peak of 843,369 viewers. Despite its success on the esports viewership front, CS:GO is not doing well on Steam. Valve's First-Person Shooter (FPS) title has registered a negative player gain for a record sixth consecutive month, according to Steam Charts.

This comes after Valve rolled out a lot of changes to prime matchmaking, and the emergence of Riot Games' Valorant as a prime player in the FPS market.

CS:GO registers record six-month decline in player gain

CS:GO has now registered a negative player gain for six months in a row starting from February 2021. This is the first time this has happened in its history, beating out the four-month slump that CS:GO had back in 2017 from August 2017 to November 2017.

Unfortunately, the decline doesn't seem to be halting any time soon. The competitive shooter has lost 3,407.5 players in the last 30 days according to Steam Charts, which equates to a percentage decline of about -0.67%.

The percentage loss was slow at first, barely slipping down in March 2021 by -0.01%, this could be attributed to the fact that CS:GO's tenth operation Broken Fang was still underway.

However, things started taking a turn for the worst following the conclusion of Broken Fang. The decline in percentage gain started to dip at an alrming rate month-on-month, reaching a record low of -16.75% in June 2021 which equated to a loss of -110,541.8 CS:GO players.

Though the recovery was sizable in July 2021 due to CS:GO returning to LAN once again with IEM Cologne. Valve really needs to pull up their socks and do something to attract the players back to the game once again.

Their recent $1,000,000 USD initiative aimed towards content creators called CS:GO Dreams & Nightmares Workshop Art Contest, is a great step forward to engage with a section of the community that do not get a global platform to showcase their talent and work.

Now, Valve needs to continue the good work and bring something for the casual users also. Shroud recently snubbing CS:GO on his livestream following a bad experience hurts the image of the game, and the developers need to do everything in order to avoid this.