New World has been much discussed since its release on 28th September as hundreds of thousands of players enjoy the game at the same time, but Valve’s Counter-Strike: Global Offensive (CS:GO) continues to beat it in terms of concurrent numbers.

We covered this recently as CS:GO crept towards 800K concurrent players, something that has happened in the last 24 hours.

According to the official Steam and game statistics page the peak concurrent player count was 801 358. The current players at the time of writing (prior to noon in South Africa) sits at 404 404.

This swell of players is likely due to the Operation Riptide event which went live last week. CS:GO is consistently one of the most popular games in the world but operation events push the numbers even higher.

Below is a live count of players from the Steam Database (SteamDB), an unofficial tracker of Valve’s store.

As you can see in the embed, while 800K is impressive, it’s far from the all-time peak concurrent player count which was 1.3 million.

This record happened last year with many agreeing that it was thanks to a record number of people stuck at home during the pandemic and firing up the game to pass the time.

But what about New World? It too is doing great with a 24 hour peak of 734 496 and a current player count that is actually higher than CS:GO at 413 504.

Again we have to think about time zones as that current number will likely go higher as we get later into the day and big territories such as the USA either wake up or finish work and log in.

While we know that CS:GO has a record of 1.3 million there’s no telling how high New World can go. Some are theorising a concurrent count of a million which would be very impressive for a new IP.

With the concurrent numbers seemingly going up a notch every single day it’s not too farfetched for the million mark to be passed, but hype (and player counts) for any given game usually spike around release. As we get further from that launch day we could see the number plateau or go down.

There’s also the matter of long wait times possibly affecting the New World numbers.