Counter-Strike 2 has now lost players for eight months in a row. Its average concurrent player count on Steam fell every month from March through October 2026, according to the Steam Charts tracker, dropping from 1,084,095 in February to 797,324 in October. That is a decline of about 26%, and it happened while Valve was shipping some of the game’s biggest additions of the year.
A screenshot of the same table reached the front of the CS2 subreddit today, where players were quick to say what they think is wrong.
October’s average of 797,324 players is the lowest since February 2024
These are the monthly averages for 2026 so far:
| Month | Average players | Change | Peak players |
|---|---|---|---|
| January | 1,070,444 | +8.00% | 1,654,355 |
| February | 1,084,095 | +1.28% | 1,627,561 |
| March | 1,069,173 | -1.38% | 1,717,624 |
| April | 974,786 | -8.83% | 1,564,830 |
| May | 932,721 | -4.32% | 1,489,217 |
| June | 916,655 | -1.72% | 1,573,727 |
| July | 853,232 | -6.92% | 1,420,896 |
| August | 825,258 | -3.28% | 1,331,274 |
| September | 805,638 | -2.38% | 1,450,705 |
| October | 797,324 | -1.03% | 1,402,441 |
The last time a month averaged lower than October was February 2024, at 786,631. Compared with October 2025, when the average was 948,244, the game is down about 16%. November is tracking lower again: the most recent 30 days average 775,201.
Summer dips are normal for Counter-Strike. July fell by roughly 9% in 2025 and nearly 8% in 2024. The difference is what came after. In 2025 the average was rising again by October, and this year it has kept sliding.
Cache, Rush and Animgraph 2 all arrived during the decline
Valve did not go quiet in this stretch. Its own update posts show three large changes landing inside the eight months:
- April 1: the Animgraph 2 beta, which moved CS2 to a new animation system and re-authored every third-person animation.
- July 8: Premier Season Five, which added Cache to the Active Duty map pool and removed Overpass.
- September 22: Rush, a new fast-paced 3v3 queued mode played across randomly selected battle arenas.
None of them reversed the trend. September, the month Rush launched, still finished 2.38% down on average players, though its peak rose to 1,450,705 from 1,331,274 in August.
Players in the thread blame the anti-cheat first
The replies under the Reddit post return to the same two complaints. The most common is cheating. One player wrote that “the cheating paranoia is so high that it ruins the fun of some games, even the cheat free ones,” and several others said a working anti-cheat alone would stop the bleeding.
The second is content for the main 5v5 game. Players asked for an operation and for more classic maps. One also named Premier matchmaking and the current Armory and sticker systems as reasons the numbers are falling.
Counter-Strike 2 is still the most played game on Steam
Some perspective belongs here. Steam’s own live chart still has Counter-Strike 2 in first place, with a 24-hour peak of about 1.2 million players, ahead of Dota 2 in second. Its all-time peak of 1,818,368 was set in March 2025, and October’s peak was still 1.4 million.
The averages come from a third-party tracker that samples Steam’s public player counts, so they are not figures from Valve, which does not publish monthly averages. Valve has not commented on the trend.
