Wasn’t that fast? If you’ve never heard of ‘Shroud’, allow me to give him a bit of a backstory. His full name is Michael Grzesiek, and once upon a time, he was a relatively talented CSGO esports competitor (with a bit of VALORANT, too). He has long since turned to content creation, and right now, he boasts almost 11 million followers on Twitch.
He also thinks Counter-Strike 2 will spell the end of the franchise that has existed for almost twenty-five years.
Will Counter-Strike 2 Kill Counter-Strike?
It’s the kind of question people ask for those sweet impressions – ‘Is Counter-Strike dying?’ However, given that CSGO peaked at more than one million players every month for a year, that seems highly unlikely – but that’s not what Shroud thinks.
While streaming some Counter-Strike 2 following the game’s global release, Shroud got particularly annoyed with some of the game’s new mechanics – such as the smoke grenades and how effective they are.
He then said, quite transparently:
I think this game dies. CS dies with ‘2’. I think it does. I firmly believe that.
When challenged by his fellow players, he stressed, “I think it’s the end of Counter-Strike with this game. I mean, we had a good run, no?”
At the time of writing, Counter-Strike 2’s concurrent player peak sits at 1.24 million. During the launch period for the game, Valve stressed that servers reached capacity with the sheer number of players that were trying to get into their matches around the world.
It’s hard to see Counter-Strike dying in the short term but in the long term? Every good thing must come to an end, right?
For more Insider Gaming coverage, check out the news that Team17 is facing layoffs
