izigame.me

CS:GO came out over 3,500 days ago, almost 10 years. Since 2014, CS:GO has never had less than 250,000 concurrent players. Many games in the last decade which are considered cornerstones of PC gaming, possibly even cornerstones of FPS games in general, never even achieved that many concurrent players at their absolute peak. In 2020, CS:GO hit its all time peak of over a million concurrent players playing all at the same time, an achievement that is likely only shared with truly Earth-shatteringly popular games like LoL and WoW. This is all to say that somehow, despite being almost a decade old, CS:GO remains one of the most popular titles on PC as a whole, beating out such rivals as Apex Legends, Valorant, Warzone, PUBG, Rainbow Six Siege, and pretty much every other FPS game you can let roll off the tongue, and likely any non-shooter title you can think of as well. I would venture to say that no game aside from Minecraft and PONG has had even remotely close to the staying power of CS:GO.
All that said, the game blows. Modern CS:GO looks dated, sounds dated, and plays like Valve's 1998 Half-Life. Source has completely knee-capped any opportunity for growth and innovation, and with a few minor meta changes and the introduction of new gamemodes and weapons, CS:GO is the same game now that it was 3,500 days ago. Some would argue that this is a sign of perfection, of effortless staying power, but I would argue that it is a sign of a lazy cash grab. Let's be honest, in comparison to modern competitors, CS:GO's movement is incredibly clunky. You can draw a direct lineage between crouch-jumping mid-doors on Dust II to completing puzzles in Black Mesa in Half Life. CS:GO is likely the only game about using firearms that does not allow you to ADS and more or less guarantees the user that the bullets coming from their firearm will not hit what they are looking at unless they have perfect movement, aim, and spray-pattern knowledge. Very few weapons have been added in the last decade, and those that have been added are generally worse in every measurable way to those that they replace. Dust II remains the most popular map and has itself only seen a light graphical upgrade with only a small handful of map design changes. New maps are introduced, regularly complained about, and removed from the current map pool. If you are reading this in 2032, Dust II is likely still the most popular map and likely remains un-upgraded.
Socially, the game is terrible. The vast majority of the user base is either incredibly toxic, racist, cheating, or a combination of all three. The way that matchmaking works, it is easy to come across smurf after smurf after smurf, losing game after game after game to players who's real skill is likely 10x higher than CS:GO placed them. I cannot begin to count the number of games in which I was subjected to player's profile pictures that were outright pornographic or I was called racial or homophobic slurs. "Toxic" does not even begin to describe how inhumane the CS:GO community can be at times.
So thus far, I have established that CS:GO is one of the most popular games on PC that has time and time again outlasted better competitors, I have dogpiled the game for looking, sounding, and playing like a game from 1998, and I have called all of the userbase toxic cheaters. If I believe all of these things, how can I possibly recommend the game? Easy - I only play CS:GO with friends. I play for fun and to collect skins. Many an hour has been spent, three or four beers deep, just chatting and joking with friends with CS:GO on in the background. Three, four, or even five-stacking pub matches is incredible fun. Playing the game in a public lobby where you and your friends work through elaborate, practiced routines of memes and jokes with poor, unsuspecting randoms is easily one of the funniest things you can do with a microphone and PC. Stupendous fun can be had when you find a player who has a sense of humor who will joke around with you as much as you with them. Every game is a win when you play with friends - you either lose the game so that your skill rating drops and you get to pub stomp the next lobby, or you win the game and your skill rating increases so that you can get pub stomped next game, thus setting you up for your own pub stomp. This circuitous motion is what keeps the game fun and fresh, you either get dumpstered on, dumpster a team, or the CS:GO matchmaking works for once and you have to fight for your life to get that 15:15. CS:GO sucks as a game, and you will never, ever see me playing it alone. But as a medium by which you can interact with your friends, CS:GO is unbeatable. Put a 30-rack in the fridge, get some T-Bell delivered, and get four friends who cannot hit the accept button with their aim and I guarantee you will make a life-long meme between the five of you.