Counter-Strike 2 has set a new online peak: a real achievement or a statistical fraud?

On February 16, 2025, Counter-Strike 2 reached 1,743,533 simultaneous players, almost breaking the historical CS:GO record of 1,802,853 set in May 2023. This caused a wave of discussions in the community, as the real figures of active players differ significantly from the official Steam figures.

Is this record real?
Reddit players and analysts began to doubt the authenticity of this data. The first question was raised by users of the CS Map Stats website, which records the real number of active players on Valve's servers.

According to CS Map Stats, there were only 515,000 players on all official CS2 servers and modes.
If you add players from FACEIT, ESEA, and other platforms, it's another 200,000 people.
Community servers (PUB, DM, hubs) - 20,000 players.
The total number of real players is estimated at 735,000.
But according to the official Steam data, there were twice as many people playing CS2 .

Why were there doubts?
The main question the community asked was: where are the other million players?

Probably, the reason for abnormally high numbers could be:

AFK bots used to farm cases and game items.
Cheating through “cheated” accounts that may remain online for trading.
A technical error or specificity of Steam's online counting, which can take into account not only active players but also those who simply launched the game without actively being on the servers.

Valve is still silent
Valve has not commented on the situation, but if the suspicions are confirmed, it could seriously damage CS2 's reputation. The game has already been criticized for poor performance and server issues, and now the real popularity of the project is also in doubt.

Is the record-breaking online performance a real achievement or an illusion created by botnets?