Counter-Strike 2 is the upcoming sequel to the Counter-Strike franchise and the first new title in the series for over 10 years. Across the last decade players have gotten comfortable in CS:GO but Valve is gearing up to switch things up with the CS2 title, which will be available as a free update for Global Offensive.
Valve initially began testing in March of this year but the available spots in the beta were quite limited and players could only play on the Dust 2 map. As the year has gone on, more and more maps have become available and on September 1st, Valve announced that the game would effectively be entering an open early access state.
The second phase of the test, which launched at the start of September, is available to any CS:GO player with a Prime Status account, an active Competitive Skill Group, and plays the majority of their matches in a region where the limited test is available. For the reason of how open the beta has become to the Counter-Strike player base, we’ve dubbed the current Limited Test a de-facto early access release.
Valve opened up the Limited Test on the first of September and a week has gone by since. In only a week CS2 has become one of the most popular games on Twitch and fans are eager not only to stream their own CS2 experiences but to watch the reactions of their favourite content creators.
Counter-Strike 2 Early Access First-week Viewership
Counter-Strike 2’s early access launch can be tracked on its game page, courtesy of our brand-new early access and release statistics we launched earlier this week. Looking at the dynamics for the title, September 1st was the most successful day in terms of garnering watch time. Almost 2K streamers went live concurrently to cover the new test and in total, they received 1.5M hours of watch time.
In terms of peak concurrent viewers, over 185K fans tuned in for the first day of the new test and many of these were concentrated on specific channels. Gaules was the most popular streamer to cover the first week of the game’s new test and he received over 86K concurrent viewers on his channel alone.
Other variety streamers like xQc also covered the release, the French-Canadian personality experienced 51K Peak Viewers during his CS2 stream. However, CS:GO established content creators and players were the most-watched streamers for the week. Professional players like s1mple and ropz received high watch time, as well as community members like ohnePixel.
Most-watched and most popular CS2 streamers of past week
OhnePixel received the highest amount of Hours Watched out of anyone this week, with 328K hours to his name. S1mple was close behind with 324K Hours Watched; the Ukranian streamer and professional player remains a popular option for fans to watch one of the Counter-Strike GOATs try out the new changes.
Many of the other streamers represent the global Counter-Strike community, as fans from around the world tune into a stream in their local language to see what CS2 is all about. Recrent was the most-watched Russian-speaking streamer of the bunch with Gaules right behind him. bysTaXx was the most-watched Spanish-speaking streamer and behind him was UNLOSTV, a Turkish-speaking channel.
Russian and Portuguese were the only two languages, excluding English, to receive multiple streamer representations in the top 10 most-watched channels. Buster is a well-known Russian-speaking streamer and community caster for CS:GO events and liminhag0d is a Portuguese-speaking creator. Many streamers like liminhag0d have experienced substantial viewership boosts through their CS2 streams. CS2 is currently a hot commodity and streamers should be aware of the power and attention it can bring to your broadcast.
Looking at the most-watched categories on Twitch of the last week, CS2 ranked eighth, just ahead of Minecraft and its ancestor CS:GO. CS2 was unable to compete with the release of Starfield, which continues to dominate Twitch viewership and internet culture as a whole.
On the other hand, CS2 is still only in its limited testing phase. Once CS2 officially releases and has time to garner the viewership it truly deserves for its release, a comparison to Starfield will be more fruitful.
2023 has seen some major game releases dominated viewership in live-streaming. Starfield, Baldur’s Gate 3, Diablo IV — all of these games dominated viewership on release and continued to push the boundaries of live-streaming viewership. CS2 is quickly on its way to release and may join in the rank of these other titles when it's finally out. Statistics on CS2’s early access will be available for all users for two weeks after the release date, but after that, it becomes exclusive content for our PRO subscribers.
