Someone was asking here before how long it would be before people finally stopped playing Counterstrike.
My ISP (which runs 38 game servers) converted all their HL/CS/DOD servers to the new Steam-based system last week.
The result :
It has basically killed off the CS/DOD community overnight. Most gamers have moved to other non-Steam games like SOFII, BF1942, DC, etc.
Well done Valve !!!
I would imagine the release of HL2, and any potential CS2, would only help to fragment the remaining community even further.
Half the appeal of CounterStrike is that it runs off the Half Life engine which itself runs on nearly all gaming computers out there, no matter how seriously outdated.
It’s not like every last CS gamer and/or the internet cafes where CS LANs are common are going to update to the hardware necessary to run.
I imagine it’ll become like the fragmented landscape that MS Windows is, with large numbers of people running 95, 98, 98SE, ME, NT and 2000 in addition to XP.
Shrug all things come to an end - QWTF was being played for a long long time after Quake 2 came out - it took TFC to really kill those servers off.
CS dead? oh no call the police. Actually, that steam is the worst idea that Valve ever came up with… and it will kill the original half life… which in Aus you still find for 50 bucks (Au)… Just have to wait and see what happens with HL2 mods… I know theres a DoD2 coming… dunno about CS2. …
Spose we’ll have to just wait and see what happens next.
A scan in All Seeing Eye just then (10PM Monday) showed 1627 players online playing Counterstrike in Australia so it hasnt quite died out completey.
Gamespy’s live stats still show Half Life with a clear lead with 53000 people playing online compared to {The next highest} battlefield 1942’s 3500 people. So even though Steam is now mandatory, HL is still quite popular.
That’s funny, I’m actually just making a news post about that.
Steam killed my HL installation.
those are the right figures? 53k to 3.5k?
Almost, i rounded them off to the nearest hundred. You can check for yourself - go to www.gamespy.com and look at the bottom of the page. (Its actually increased now… 61638 for HL, 4330 for BF1942.)
Ah yeah all of HL. I read your first post wrong. That’s still quite the QW like lead it has over everything else.
I hope my Natural Selection still works without me having to screw with this stuff
Save these numbers and then come back after two weeks from now and check again. Once WON authentication goes by the wayside, thereby forcing steam connectivity to play online, we’ll have a much better idea how much of the community remains intact.
I’m still amazed at the numbers HL still has online. I guess its like the epople that keep playing EQ, and UO in a way. Just fire the same game up over and over and over. Like a habit or something.
I think that’s exactly it. It’s too much trouble for many people to switch games.
I get like that with the MMOGs. It’s much easier to just play something I already know than it is to install and learn how to play a new game.
Not to mention just how outdated your computer can be and still play Half Life and CounterStrike … which will cut into sales of HL2 and CS2.
I like how the start of this thread, back in 2003, asks when people will finally stop playing CS.
Anyway, according to this story a full thirty-nine percent of CS 1.6 servers on Steam are malicious. And the game still gets 20k concurrent players!
I thought that maybe this was a new thread. Imagine my surprise when I saw it was 2003. Counterstrike had barely even gotten started by that time (exaggerating a little, obviously).
I was never a counter-striker, but the mod came out in 1999 and popular enough for Valve to buy it in 2000, so it should have been really well-established by 2003.
Yes, of course. I had probably played thousands of hours by that time. I’m just pointing out that looking at the extended timeline (currently 2019) you could almost say that Counterstrike was still in its infancy (although I will certainly admit that its influence (at least in terms of game design) was pretty much coming to an end by that time.
I don’t know how to measure its influence, but they rebuilt it into Source engine, released it on every console, and re-released it a couple of times to boot.
Oddly, unlike the current crop of battle royales and such, I don’t recall anyone ever ripping them off and cloning CS. Maybe it happened and they all immediately failed?
Maybe I’m remembering the wrong game, but didn’t CS have some semi-complicated stealth mechanics? Kind of hard to rip off. At least for lazy developers making 2000s shovelware.