Valorant and Counter-Strike: Global Offensive are two of the most popular first-person shooter games, but which has the higher player count?.
Each of them has its own loyal fans, so we thought it would be interesting to compare the two, to see which one is currently the more popular. Will it be Valorant, the hero shooter created by Riot Games? Or will Valve's Counter-Strike prove to be the bigger of the two?
Both games take similar 5 vs 5 set-ups. But there can only be one winner. Unless they somehow manage to have exactly the same number of players.
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Valorant vs CSGO Player Count
The lack of definitive data for Valorant makes it very difficult for us to gauge how popular it really is in terms of player numbers compared to CSGO. But we do know it remains very popular with Esports fans.
For most PC games on Steam, Steam Charts offers an accurate look at player numbers, but as Valorant is only available via Riot, this active player count remains elusive.
CSGO continues to deliver incredibly strong numbers, even though it is almost a decade old. Whether Valorant will remain as popular after so long, or could ever reach the heights of CSGO, only time will tell.
Here's a deeper look into the player counts of each FPS game...
Valorant Player Count
Valorant was officially launched in June 2020 with a beta period running from April that same year. During its beta period, it amassed the second-highest number of concurrent viewers on Twitch ever. 1.73 million people tuned in to watch. It received favourable reviews and quickly amassed a fanbase.
In that same beta period, Valorant was played by almost 3 million people per day, according to Riot.
While Riot Games remained tight-lipped on the Valorant data for a while, it announced in June 2021 that 14 million players log in to play Valorant every month
According toTwitch, Valorant remains one of the most-watched games on the platform.
It enjoyed around 97,000 average concurrent viewers over the week, as per July 2021. It also remains hugely popular as an eSports event - 8 million hours and 470,000 viewers of the First Strike tournament, suggest that Valorant still attracts big crowds.
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CSGO Player Count
CSGO is something of a veteran in comparison to Valorant. It is the fourth game in the Counter-Strike series and was released all the way back in 2012. The game received positive reviews and a lot of fans, who have remained loyal to this day.
Thanks to the game being produced by Valve, who owns the Steam gaming platform, we have access to much more detailed numbers than we do for Valorant. To prove its enduring appeal, back in March 2020, CSGO achieved a milestone of having over 1 million concurrent players. This was the first time since its release 8 years prior. To see a rise in players after 8 years is pretty extraordinary.
But the remarkable numbers don't end there. At the time of writing, CSGO was the most played game on the platform according to Steam Charts. They recorded over 500 million hours played, and a peak of 1.1 million players. This is almost half a million players, and 200 million hours more than the second most popular game on the platform (Dota 2). Since November 2020, CSGO has exceeded 1 million peak players every single month.
Clearly, this is a game that is still going extremely strong. It does, however, sit below Valorant on Twitch in terms of viewers, at 55,600 average concurrent viewers.
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