Valve's popular online shooter Counter-Strike: Global Offensive (CS:GO) has hit a new record for concurrent players.

As reported by SteamCharts, the title brought in 1,519,457 concurrent players on Sunday, March 26th. That's an increase of 165,209 on the peak that we saw during February 2023.

This is likely due to hype surrounding the upcoming Counter-Strike 2, which was previously rumoured but has since been properly announced by Valve. Progression carriers over from CS:GO, meaning that players have every reason to still be invested in the current iteration of the popular shooter franchise for now. PC Gamer also reports that there is speculation that access to the upcoming Counter-Strike 2 beta is being reserved for folks who play CS:GO lots.

CS:GO has seen an increasing users since launch, though its concurrent player base has massively increased since February 2020 largely due to the global lockdowns to curb the spread of the COVID-19 coronavirus. Before then, the game was struggling to exceed 900k concurrent players, but since then it has rarely been below this figure. Being free-to-play as of December 2018 has no doubt helped, too.