Counter-Strike developer confirms nearly 1 million bots have been banned

Counter-Strike is one of the biggest first-person shooter games to exist, and with regular peaks of nearly 1.5 million concurrent players on Steam, it begs the question - how many of those players are actually human?

With any massively popular video game, you will almost inevitably discover a botting problem, but given that Counter-Strike has an extremely lucrative skin market attached to it, the botting situation is a far greater problem than other multiplayer titles. However, that problem may have been partially pruned as Counter-Strike 2 developer Ido Magal, the project lead on Counter-Strike: Global Offensive and Counter-Strike 2, has said that Valve has banned 970,000 bot accounts.

The banning of nearly 1 million bot accounts was a result of a "bunch of investigations that benefited from user reports". Looking at the CS2Stats website, we can see that Counter-Strike 2 VAC and game bans have skyrocketed as of the 26th of March. Currently, 17,000 bans have been issued, but CS2Stats only tracks official Valve matchmaking modes, such as competitive and premier, not casual matches such as Deathmatch or bot lobbies / farming servers.