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Counter Strike: Global Offensive went free to play after years of having a premium price tag in December 2018. Along with the free to play, CS:GO developers also added the new Battle Royale mode: Danger Zone.
CS:GO veteran Nors3 tweeted earlier that the game reached 20,535,709 unique players in December, twice the number of the players in November. The stats don't lie, you can see the number of players both on SteamCharts and SteamDB.
The number of active players in December jumped by about 200,000. According to the data in SteamCharts, the daily average number of players in December was 395,509 with a peak of 746,548. In November, these numbers were 310,085 average and 546,031 at peak.
The record number of concurrent players, however, was around 850,000 back in March 2018. Still, CS:GO usually averages less than 300,000 concurrent players so this is a huge step.
While the Battle Royale mode Danger Zone has mostly received positive reception, the decision to go free to play was not well received among players. The CS:GO Steam Store page was bombarded with 14,000 negative reviews in just one day. It grew a little more over the subsequent days.
Players who already bought the game received a "Prime Status" upgrade where players are placed higher in queues and they will be eligible to receive loot such as item drops, souvenirs, weapon cases and more only if they have the Prime Status. Players can also choose to purchase Prime Status if they wish. This didn't stop all the negative reviews from flooding in though.
Will CS:GO be able to keep up and compete with other FPS and Battle Royales in the market? We don't quite know yet, but let's see if this 19-year-old franchise can keep up in 2019!
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