The 'Predict HL1CS vs HL2CS numbers a year from now' thread

[Derek Meister]

Obviously Valve is using the port of Counterstrike over to Half Life 2's engine as another selling point, but I have to wonder what the actual number of players of HL2 Counterstrike will be to those still playing CS under HL1.

Looking at the live server stats (http://archive.gamespy.com/stats/) that Gamespy makes available, you'll often come across Half Life currently having between 80,000 and 110,000 players listed online at any given moment. Despite the wide number of Half Life mods, I'd be willing to bet that at least 80% to 90% of those are Counterstrike players.

Compare that to the next five highest games at any moment, and you'll see anywhere
between 3000 to 8000 players.

So what are your predictions as to the number of players come a year from now? Will Half Life 2's port of Counterstrike completely dominate, pushing HL1CS completely off the charts? Or will HL1CS continue to have at least the #2 spot a year from now, with an outside shot at being #1?

Personally, I'm giving Half Life 2 Counterstrike a 50-50 chance of besting HL1, mainly because in my completely baseless opinion, most of Counterstrike's popularity comes not just from it being a familiar game, but from its ability to run on truely ancient hardware, something that makes it a viable game for lan centers all over the world much in the same way that Starcraft still retains a good portion of players.

Between home players forced to use that Hewlett Packard their parents bought and commercial lan centers and internet cafes who agonized over buying TNT1s for their systems, I feel there will be enough holdout players that I believe HL1CS will be a high listing on player lists a full twelve months from now.

[tronnc]

I don't think there is any chance of CS Source taking on original CS in numbers of people playing at any time.

Looking at www.csports.net right now, CS has 67,379 while the next highest HalfLife mode is DOD with only 4,084.

CS Source will have alot of players but I doubt it will even reach Battlefield numbers.

Put it this way, I think the success of Counterstrike is its great gameplay and low end system requirements. If there were any other FPS that required more modern system requirements and was getting just half of the counterstrike numbers. Than Id say CS Source has a shot at being as popular, but no games are even close to original CS numbers.

[Charles]

20% at an absolute max. System requirements. Half the people who play CS are still running three year old boxes.

[Supertanker]

Despite the wide number of Half Life mods, I'd be willing to bet that at least 80% to 90% of those are Counterstrike players.

You don't have to guess, just click on the name of the game and it gives you the breakdown by mod.

Between home players forced to use that Hewlett Packard their parents bought and commercial lan centers and internet cafes who agonized over buying TNT1s for their systems, I feel there will be enough holdout players that I believe HL1CS will be a high listing on player lists a full twelve months from now.

I think you are correct about the LAN centers. The ones I have dealt with don't seem to have an upgrade plan or budget, and even BF1942 is a bit dodgy on many of their machines. There are a few centers that do a good job keeping up, but then there is also a shake-out going on. We used to have four LAN centers in our town, now we have one.

Another reason I think you are right that people won't upgrade is Condition Zero. Despite its improved graphics, it only manages about 5% of standard CS numbers. Some of that is hardware, some of that is people's reluctance to pay for CS again.

The hardware is a little better than I first thought. According to the latest numbers on Valve's survey ( http://www.steampowered.com/status/survey.html ), about 25% of the survey group is running Radeon 9600 or better and non-MX GeForce4s.

[Backov]

After seeing the E3 gameplay movie with CS (and de_dust) - I REALLY want to play CS again.

[Tim Partlett]

It's strange to see BFV with more players than UT2k3 and UT2k4 combined, considering the relatively luke-warm reviews it received. Is there something I am missing here?

[tronnc]

It's strange to see BFV with more players than UT2k3 and UT2k4 combined, considering the relatively luke-warm reviews it received. Is there something I am missing here?

BF V is a really fun game, despite the fact that it really needs a patch asap.

While right now BF V is ahead, if you look at all players in the last 31 days UT2k4 is much higher. So the UT players are just not online in force right now.

In last 31 days:
UT2k4 - 674,750

BFV - 312,210

[Derek Meister]

I remember someone looked at the BFV vs UT04 statistics from the site over a few weeks and noticed that BFV had very slightly higher numbers online at any given second, but a much lower "unique players listed" over the same length of time.

We pretty much figured that UT04 gets more people hopping on to play, but they do so for a much shorter amount of time, compared to less BFV players who stay on longer. It probably has to do with the differences in pacing between the two games.

I think UT04 could produce better numbers if they had updated the number of non-Onslaught maps in a better proportion to Onslaught maps. There were very few new CTF maps that hadn't already been released with UT03, and the community has been concentrating on ONS, much to the dismay of players of the other gametypes.

BFV has also been doing slightly better than UT04 in sales, keeping a much more steady pace than UT04 which has dropped off in the last few weeks.

[Tim Partlett]

Where did you find those stats?

I would say that it's also possible that U2K4 could have slipped in popularity over the last couple of weeks. I have to admit that I loved UT2k4 at first, and played it like crazy for a couple of weeks, but I quickly got bored of it.

[nutsak]

I'm on the side of 'CS2 will take over from CS1'.

I believe this mainly due to the apparent flixability of the new Source engine. Alot of CS players may have 'less than good' boxes, but I doubt that they'd still have the same boxes they started out with for the original CS. I'd say what they have now would be considered 'beasts' for the original CS.

In fact - just look at the steam powered hardware survey.
http://steampowered.com/status/survey.html

Most people are running computers with Geforce4 MX cards and and have cpus that range from 1.7-2.0 Ghz, that's more than enough to run the Source engine in low detail grahpics (no 'fruit') and yet have the physics (which will be the selling point) still able to run just fine.

Now that survey was for all of steam - which we've pretty much already covered here are 90% odd CS1 players.

Essentially CS2 will be the same in every way excluding the new physics and slight update in graphics (if you've seen the preview for CS it's no big leap in graphics - look at the players arms) - and that will be the driving force behind people switching over. People go gaga for ragdolls and barrels flying all over the joint and Valve will probably use that as the hook.