October’s average is the lowest since February 2024, and no run of monthly declines in the game’s tracked history has lasted this long.
Counter-Strike 2 averaged 797,324 concurrent players on Steam in October, down 1.03% from September, according to SteamCharts. It is the eighth month in a row that the average has fallen, and the lowest monthly figure since February 2024, when it stood at 786,631.
The slide started straight after February, the high point of the year at 1,084,095. Since then the game has lost 286,770 players from its monthly average, or 26.5%. Compared with October 2025, the drop is 15.9%.
Longer than any slide in the CS:GO years
SteamCharts has tracked Counter-Strike on Steam since July 2012, and eight straight months of decline has not happened before in that data. The previous longest run was six months, from February to July 2021, in the CS:GO era. Before that, the average fell four months in a row in late 2017.
| Month | Average players | Change | Peak |
|---|---|---|---|
| February 2026 | 1,084,095 | +1.28% | 1,627,561 |
| March 2026 | 1,069,173 | -1.38% | 1,717,624 |
| April 2026 | 974,786 | -8.83% | 1,564,830 |
| May 2026 | 932,721 | -4.32% | 1,489,217 |
| June 2026 | 916,655 | -1.72% | 1,573,727 |
| July 2026 | 853,232 | -6.92% | 1,420,896 |
| August 2026 | 825,258 | -3.28% | 1,331,274 |
| September 2026 | 805,638 | -2.38% | 1,450,705 |
| October 2026 | 797,324 | -1.03% | 1,402,441 |
The fall is slowing down
October’s drop of 8,314 players is the smallest of the eight. Most of the decline came in two months: April, when the average fell by 94,387, and July, when it fell by 63,422.
The peak tells a similar story. October topped out at 1,402,441, below September but above August’s 1,331,274, the lowest peak since January 2024. The all-time high of 1,818,368 is from March 2025.
A summer dip is nothing new for the game. July also brought drops of 7.62% in 2024 and 8.92% in 2025. The difference is what followed. Last year, the average climbed every month from October to February. This year, September and October have both gone the other way.
Fewer bots in the count
Some of the fall may be accounts that were never players in the first place. In late March, Valve banned close to a million bot accounts farming weekly drops in a single day, a wave CS2 project lead Ido Magal confirmed on Reddit. April, the first full month after it, brought the biggest drop of the streak, and our September look at the numbers already pointed to the bot bans as one likely factor.
Valve has not said how much of the decline comes from bot removals and how much from real players leaving, and there is no public way to separate the two in Steam’s numbers.
SteamCharts’ average for the last 30 days stands at 796,578, so the first days of November have not turned the trend yet.
