Now that Prime is paid-only and will likely never go on sale, there's a guaranteed minimum cost to cheat.If you are new to the world of Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, then you might think that the only platform of skin trading is Steam Community Market. Before CS:GO was free-to-play, cheaters could wait for a Steam sale (opens in new tab) and purchase the game for as many alternate accounts as they wished with a clean path to Prime status. For as much as Prime status has changed over the years, this has potential to be its most effective iteration yet. I would hope that many of the June no-shows are would-be cheaters. Almost a decade into its lifespan, it remains the most popular FPS on Steam. The natural ebb and flow of player interest between updates is certainly a factor too, though it's important to note that, recent dip be damned, CS:GO has never been more popular than in the last year. So, if the new Prime rules are good for the game's health, why the drop in players? It could be a number of things, but I suspect a sizable chunk of the accounts that didn't sign in during June could be alternate or smurf accounts held by existing players that did not pay to legitimize their matchmaking. How to surf in CS:GO: (opens in new tab) Tips and servers
In a recent dev blog (opens in new tab), Valve admitted that since going free-to-play, CS:GO's Prime status has been abused by "bad actors" (likely referring to cheaters and smurf accounts) to "hurt the experience of both new and existing players." Accounts that already had Prime status were grandfathered in when the new patch rolled out, but any accounts that didn't already have it after a two-week deadline have to pay $15 to play CS:GO's marquee Competitive mode.īest CS:GO skins: (opens in new tab) FPS styleĬS:GO ranks: (opens in new tab) How they work Since its inception, Prime status has aimed to promote fairness by making it harder for cheaters and smurf accounts to enter ranked play. The changes to Prime status are a reasonable culprit for the anomaly.
Still, this is the steepest month-on-month decline the game has seen since 2018. It's worth noting that CS:GO's player base regularly fluctuates like any other multiplayer game, and perhaps moreso for one of the most popular games on PC. According to CS:GO's recent concurrent player count averages as recorded by SteamCharts (opens in new tab), first spotted by Dot Esports (opens in new tab), the game has seen a 16.7% drop (a loss of over 100,000 average players) since the early June patch.
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