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Counter-Strike 2’s player count has hit a new all-time high but that may be slightly exaggerated. The “player” part, not the “count” part.
Though fans have long felt that Dota 2 and the new hero shooter Deadlock have been Valve’s favorite games, Counter-Strike has been its most successful for years now. The introduction of Valorant paradoxically helped push Counter-Strike: Global Offensive to new player count heights, and the momentum didn’t slow down when Counter-Strike 2 was released according to the numbers published by Steam Charts.
The CS2 player count has broken series records a few times over, most recently in March 2025. While continued growth is the expectation, it may be propelled by some potentially unorthodox and unwanted methods.
On April 12, 2025, Counter-Strike 2 hit a record player count of 1,818,368. There was plenty going on in Counter-Strike during the day, including the semifinals of PGL Bucharest. But the biggest thing that mobilized players was likely the April 1 armory update.
Last year, Valve implemented something akin to a battle pass system with Armory Passes, where players earn a “stars” currency which can be traded for skins, cases, and other in-game items. This was shaken up on April 1 with the additions of the 2025 Train Collection, the Fever Case, and a limited-edition XM1014 shotgun with unique patterns. With how Armory Passes work, players have more freedom and incentive to grind their way to items.
Alternatively, skin traders can use bots to passively acquire items. News of this new Counter-Strike 2 player count record had many speculating that these gains were, in fact, propelled by bots.
Across social media, discussion on the news was met with players discussing the state of casual matchmaking. Players delivered anecdotes of booting up regular matchmaking only to effectively play a bot game. These are packed with non-responsive, AI-controlled player characters that may or may not be cheating. Naturally, this makes for a suboptimal player experience.
Many Counter-Strike 2 players have discussed issues involving bots in casual matchmaking.
Though modes like Premier have protections for players that keep out some bad actors, casual matchmaking has long been a wild west of an experience. With Counter-Strike 2 being a free-to-play game, banned players often wind up in casual matchmaking after making a new account. While Armory Passes have undoubtedly made Valve significant amounts of money, the system unintentionally encourages botting to farm items.
Botting to farm items is also commonplace in other Valve games, most notably Team Fortress 2. The game has encountered similar issues at different points for the same reason, as players were able to obtain weapons that could be crafted into sellable hats. Alongside bots, many of the game’s community servers were also “idle servers” where players could log in and passively farm items without actually playing.
But while there has been trading value to TF2 items for years, the money surrounding Counter-Strike skins is significantly larger. This makes it so that Counter-Strike 2’s Armory Pass actively rewards bot users, and likely punishes the average player.
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