On Steamcharts, Counterstrike has been the #1 game on Steam every single day I have EVER looked at this site, for at least 3 years now. This top 10 has basically been the same for years… I don’t get it. Do people just not play anything else?
Dota, Rust, PUBG, GTA V, Call of Duty, Apex… Admittedly, Satisfactory is new to the top 10. Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six Siege FINALLY fell out of the top 10, adn so did Destiny 2.
It just feels like it never changes, which is crazy… what happened?
I’m in my 40s and I’ve been playing counterstrike since I was in my 20s. I play other games briefly but anytime i’m bored I still hop on CS. It’s a habit like checking your locks 3 times or taking your clothes off to poop
Buddy… What?
Gotta make sure everything is locked, helps with pooping.
I don’t know about every time, but I’ve had an intestinal blockage. Everything came off. I was sweating and crying for what felt like hours. Pooping was the best feeling I’ve ever had at that moment.
Been there, though I just took a couple hours in the shower with the enema wand set to “pressure wash”
While I don’t fully disrobe, the freedom of pulling one leg out of my pants is amazing. You can get a nice spread going for those times you need to bear down a bit.
It’s a habit like licking the bottom of your shoes when you get home.
The older I get, the less I want to learn new competitive games because I just don’t have time anymore. It’s just nice to go back to something familiar every now and then.
It’s free to play, there’s a huge market for skins, and some gambling addiction to go with it. The perfect storm.
It’s also a very solid game. (the same can’t be said for every game on that list but it’s true for many of them)
(A very solid game that openly allows cheating and does little to ensure fair competition)
You lack skill.exe
I thought this was common knowledge about the game but I’ll explain.
Now maybe I do need to get better and become a pro player but I have about 5k hours in the game. Since about 2016 I’ve played at the LEM/SMFC level which is about 5-8% of the top MM players. My current elo still hovers around 18,000 even though I play very rarely now, I play a handful of matches every other month at most. I also used to do a lot of the old overwatch system that let you watch matches of potential cheaters, I got very good at spotting them.
That isn’t to brag, I’m far from the best, but I quit playing around 2020 for a reason. The cheater problem is insane and Valve has done little to curb it. I got so suspicious that at one point I downloaded a publicly available cheat, popped it on a usb stick, and ran with it. I tried to use it intentionally without ruining other peoples fun btw. Even after running quite a few matches with it, no bad happened. And many years later that account is still not banned.
I got especially jaded when I saw people obviously using aimbots or wall hacks and they now have thousands of dollars in skins on their accounts. Meaning they’re so unafraid of getting caught, they put money on the line. That’s insane.
I came back for the CS2 update hoping they had fixed the problem and they absolutely haven’t. Every single VAC ban wave, go look at the leaderboards. Approximately 80% of the accounts get removed from the top 1000 players. That sucks.
And you think “cool well at least VAC” is working. Except it isn’t. Because those accounts cost, at most, $15 and the waves happen with many months between. Sometimes in excess of 6-8 months per ban wave. So that entire time, cheaters can freely exist with cheats until the ban comes down. Also insane.
All they’ve accomplished now seems to be getting rid of the most egregious spinbots and aim hacks. Other than that, the rest are still in the game and so now I play entirely casually.
Those games are played by a demographic that only plays that game, or close enough. They’d consider themselves a Dota player before they consider themselves a video game player in general. These games aren’t played exclusively by that type of person, but a large part of their audience is the type of player who just plays that game. I’m having trouble digging it up, but the person who created Steamspy a number of years ago, before privacy laws made public profiles opt-in and interfered with its ability to collect data, found that the majority of Steam accounts only had a single game in their libraries.
That kinda explains the dissciation gamers and game makers (studio,publisher etc ) have with each other today. And the publishers continuus trying at live service games. I imagine similar thing is happening with consoles. I personaly knew it was a thing with FIFA but i never knew it was so widespread ( fifa and sports game are kinda special or at least i thought they were ). Maybe those pepole bought one game a year additionaly sometimes if it was aired often enough as ad on tv.
That actually explains so much shit we see today , like online subcsriptions on PlayStation and xbox. If the majority ( or large enough minority ) will play one game only making them pay for online is a goddam goldmine. F* i would probably do it if was ceo of PlayStation and actually knew the stats ( and Obviusly if they were favorable ).
20 years ago, we paid for online because it was better than what you got for free on PC, PlayStation, and Nintendo. Now an online subscription is probably one of several reasons that people are moving to PC.
I’m having trouble digging it up, but the person who created Steamspy a number of years ago, before privacy laws made public profiles opt-in and interfered with its ability to collect data, found that the majority of Steam accounts only had a single game in their libraries.
A lot of those are going to be alts people made to evade game/server bans or smurf.
I may or may not have made 10 accounts that only had Garry’s Mod on them circa 2010.
That may be true, but you can also see, for instance, that there are a ton of Chinese users who only play Dota 2 or only play PUBG. You’ll see the percentage of Simplified Chinese users ebb and flow with a similar cadence to just those two games.
I’d consider accounts with only a single game most likely to be bot or cheater accounts. I wonder what the percentage would be.
People like that CS doesn’t change. It just eventually gets visual upgrades with new engine versions. You can hop on CS, and know the exact game play you’re going to get.
Also, custom CS servers for extremely different game play are a thing.
Dropping in and not having to get back up to speed with a game has become more important to my gaming life than I wish it was. I don’t have time to change it. Even minimal-story games like Valheim or Elite: Dangerous have become too cumbersome because I have to spend a bunch of time figuring out what I did last, what I need to gather, and what I need to build to progress. I can either go mine/sail iron in Valheim, I can hope my pirate hunter ship and pirate activity are close to where I last docked… Or I can just play some basic game and take 5 minutes to get up to speed instead of spending the first 45 minutes recalibrating my memory. It makes a difference when you might only play 3 times a week and have less than 2 hours left. I’m hoping next year goes better, but for now, it’s battle Royale, team match, or racing games.
Obviously, there’s a massive competitive attractiveness for some people to games like PUBG and CS as well. But it’s not all trigger-finger addicts. Some of us are just trying to have an OK time, not the best time.
E:D doesn’t really have them, but valheim and other information heavy games tend to have writeable signs. Since early modded minecraft, I have utilized these signs to communicate with my future self; writing down what I’m doing at the time and what my major goals are before logging off for the night is just part of my gaming routine now. Takes me a few seconds of reading to trigger the flow of action again. When games don’t have signs, I use a notepad .txt file to track what I was up to, or failing that I’ll save a note in my phone.
I would never have finished factorio or satisfactory without text files and signage. I would never have finished most large minecraft modpacks without signage. Organization skills rock.
Because Fortnite isn’t on Steam. Super sure if it was, it would have usurped CS for the top spot.
Keep in mind that Counter-Strike has been a massively popular competitive shooter with tournaments and the biggest pro scene in the West for decades. It’s had years to cultivate its massive following. Most of the other games on the top 10 are babies by comparison to CS’s old man status.
Because Fortnite isn’t on Steam. Super sure if it was, it would have usurped CS for the top spot.
I actually do really enjoy Fortnite, but according to their in-game stats, it’s hit a lull. The other one is minecraft… idk what people do in that game though. Never tried it haha. just seeking something fun and it’s just the same games every single month…
Minecraft is so moddable, most people playing Minecraft might actually just be playing another game built inside Minecraft lol
Minecraft is so moddable
Damn I wish it was on steam. The workshop installing/uninstalling mods would be sooooo easy
The front-end launchers that are most popular basically work that way; they have browsers that makes installing mods as simple as one click. The Bedrock edition also somewhat works that way, it just has fewer impressive mods and they’re not free.
Can confirm, BuildCraft was Satisfactory before Satisfactory
Buildcraft + IC2, my beloved
These games have infinite replay value and people like them. That’s all a top ranking game is. Many have tried to replicate these successes and failed (in recent memory, Concord). There have been a huge number of good games coming out too. But they’re not somthing you put 2,000 hours into with your friends.
There’a a big element of the snowball effect too. Big games attract more players than small games. Esports are a lot like normal sports in that regard. People make new sports pretty often but Football, Basketball, Baseball etc have been around for 100+ years so they have large communities and social relevance. If I asked my buds to go out for a match of “whipple stick”, my new favorite sport, they’d just laugh at me.
On the other hand, new games CAN become huge if they’re built well enough. A few of the top 10 were released less than 10 years ago, which says a lot about how these “main games” DO change over time. I think Deadlock will get up there after a few years of polishing.
because they run on everything and are free
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You can play something like dota with people on a very basic computer and okayish connection. You’ll always find matches too.
Most of them are good games the others are played by people who only play those games
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CS is like chess. Perfect and timeless. 6000 hours over 12 years of non-stop queueing competitive
*Checkers
Counter Strike Source was like chess if you ask me. In CS GO they added this gambling system, which made the game less attractive for me
gambling? interesting. i just play because I don’t know where my mom’s money is
it’s a really good game, and is heavily supported by Valve to keep it good
cheating seems like an issue but i imagine that’s always been the case
The games that sit at the top of the player counts are almost always multiplayer competitive games. In a lot of ways, there’s been nearly 0 movement in the space at all since covid. The same games are still right there at the top because no new massively multiplayer game has released to top them. FPS players play CoD, Apex, Fortnite and Pubg, Dota is massive in Asian countries, GTA V has a huge cult following (check out its twitch category).
Satisfactory being top 10 is an outlier rather than the norm, being a single player game.
I agree with the other commenter who said that players of these games consider themselves players of Apex/CoD/Pubg before they consider themselves overall gamers. That’s the case with me now, and I rarely launch anything outside of CoD or Apex as I have little to no interest in single player games.
Satisfactory isn’t massively multiplayer but it is coop up to 4 players, been enjoying it with my brother since 1.0 release
CS probably has some sort of skin money-laundering bots in it. I would see it more as a financial vector and less of a game if that were true.
Depends on how you look at it. CS is the only thing I’ve been playing after years of gaming and I think it will stay that way due to the simplicity and the familiarity of the game.
No one has topped them yet.
