CS:GO - Feels dying, but is definitely growing

[Tomoko]

I'm really interested by this apparent contradiction within CS:GO. I've seen quite a few forum posts claiming cs is a "dying game" and is "Going to lose players if they keep this up!". Despite that, CS:GO has been steadily growing, and its average peak now has only really been outdone in 2020. Otherwise, the player numbers are definitely growing.

CS:GO is, data-wise and player-count wise, NOT a dying game. Yet, to me and many others, it feels like it's dying. It feels like Valve is doing things like adding in new player skins and milking us dry with garbage operations just to squeeze out extra cash before dumping the game.

And yet, to the contrary, they've been adding plenty of fixes, updates and patches, and balancing and tweaking weapons in a unique way that we've not really seen before. (Although that has led to extremely CT-sidedness, and Dust 2 is still one of the worse maps to play right now).

It kinda feels like cognitive dissonance. It definitely feels like CS:GO is going down the drain: The matchmaking system is still definitely bad, it constantly (although not always) matches silvers against master guardians, doesn't take into consideration actual skill, makes genuine progression substantially harder, and smurfs and cheaters are just as rampant as always. And yet, the major contributor to these issues in most games I've played is a DROPPING player count - Matchmaking systems fail when there aren't enough players, games get filled with trolls and cheaters when there's no moderators or evolving systems in place to ban them, and the game stagnates and dies.

But that definitely isn't the cause - Overwatch is still a thing, community-run and powering Valve's Anti-Cheat to become more adept at discovering cheats and cheaters, smurfing and communication abuse are now more heavily punished, and as said before, player count is thriving.

So what's causing these issues? Are they simply all inside my head? Is this just how CS is? Valorant has quite a chunk of these issues too, but I never had issues with cheaters in Valorant, trolls were rare and the ranking system felt fluid enough to actually move around, so smurfing wasn't super common. But, Valorant's shooting mechanics were worse than CS:GO's, and I just quit that game because the craftsmanship wasn't the same.

I'm really grasping at straws here. Why does the game just feel like it's getting worse, when all contributing factors should be making the game BETTER?

[PatchAdams]

Player count includes people using third-party services like Faceit, so it's hard to draw conclusions about matchmaking from it. If absolutely everyone moved to Faceit etc., the player count might be high, but it would be a sign of disaster for the game.

[Blur Dre@m]

I was a COVID-FINANCE expert last year. This year I'm a CSGO expert. I love talking about statistics without sourcing anything. This seems like my type of thread.

[L0ve Sat]

csgo is very nice

[Tomoko]

Originally posted by PatchAdams:

Player count includes people using third-party services like Faceit, so it's hard to draw conclusions about matchmaking from it. If absolutely everyone moved to Faceit etc., the player count might be high, but it would be a sign of disaster for the game.

Yeah, I suppose you're right, there. Maybe Match-making is losing player counts as Valve diversifies where players can go, and as third party services take off.

I found more issues with faceit than with matchmaking, though. It was just so much more toxic and the matchmaking was even worse in it - Which kind of defeated the purpose of playing faceit to begin with.

[Snium.GcC]

The growth of users is due to the monopoly of the market. The shooting game 5V5 has only CSGO in the world, and the original CS1.6 has disappeared.
The STEAM company management is a bunch of super smart people. They are eating the profits of the monopoly market.

[MAXE]

Originally posted by Mancini:

The growth of users is due to the monopoly of the market. The shooting game 5V5 has only CSGO in the world, and the original CS1.6 has disappeared.
The STEAM company management is a bunch of super smart people. They are eating the profits of the monopoly market.

The original is not 1.6 but the 1.4 no source version from 1999 is the original version of CS !
It was a Mod for Half Life 1 owners and was free to play ..

[LaGgIs]

What i think what people means with the game it's dying they mean that it's more and more and more cheaters not because the game it's actually dying