I'm in my 40s and I've been playing counterstrike since I was in my 20s. I play other games briefly but anytime i'm bored I still hop on CS. It's a habit like checking your locks 3 times or taking your clothes off to poop

It's free to play, there's a huge market for skins, and some gambling addiction to go with it. The perfect storm.

Those games are played by a demographic that only plays that game, or close enough. They'd consider themselves a Dota player before they consider themselves a video game player in general. These games aren't played exclusively by that type of person, but a large part of their audience is the type of player who just plays that game. I'm having trouble digging it up, but the person who created Steamspy a number of years ago, before privacy laws made public profiles opt-in and interfered with its ability to collect data, found that the majority of Steam accounts only had a single game in their libraries.

People like that CS doesn't change. It just eventually gets visual upgrades with new engine versions. You can hop on CS, and know the exact game play you're going to get.

Also, custom CS servers for extremely different game play are a thing.

Because Fortnite isn't on Steam. Super sure if it was, it would have usurped CS for the top spot.

Keep in mind that Counter-Strike has been a massively popular competitive shooter with tournaments and the biggest pro scene in the West for decades. It's had years to cultivate its massive following. Most of the other games on the top 10 are babies by comparison to CS's old man status.

These games have infinite replay value and people like them. That's all a top ranking game is. Many have tried to replicate these successes and failed (in recent memory, Concord). There have been a huge number of good games coming out too. But they're not somthing you put 2,000 hours into with your friends.

There'a a big element of the snowball effect too. Big games attract more players than small games. Esports are a lot like normal sports in that regard. People make new sports pretty often but Football, Basketball, Baseball etc have been around for 100+ years so they have large communities and social relevance. If I asked my buds to go out for a match of "whipple stick", my new favorite sport, they'd just laugh at me.

On the other hand, new games CAN become huge if they're built well enough. A few of the top 10 were released less than 10 years ago, which says a lot about how these "main games" DO change over time. I think Deadlock will get up there after a few years of polishing.

because they run on everything and are free

You can play something like dota with people on a very basic computer and okayish connection. You'll always find matches too.

CS is like chess. Perfect and timeless. 6000 hours over 12 years of non-stop queueing competitive

Most of them are good games the others are played by people who only play those games

The games that sit at the top of the player counts are almost always multiplayer competitive games. In a lot of ways, there’s been nearly 0 movement in the space at all since covid. The same games are still right there at the top because no new massively multiplayer game has released to top them. FPS players play CoD, Apex, Fortnite and Pubg, Dota is massive in Asian countries, GTA V has a huge cult following (check out its twitch category).

Satisfactory being top 10 is an outlier rather than the norm, being a single player game.

I agree with the other commenter who said that players of these games consider themselves players of Apex/CoD/Pubg before they consider themselves overall gamers. That’s the case with me now, and I rarely launch anything outside of CoD or Apex as I have little to no interest in single player games.

it's a really good game, and is heavily supported by Valve to keep it good

cheating seems like an issue but i imagine that's always been the case

CS probably has some sort of skin money-laundering bots in it. I would see it more as a financial vector and less of a game if that were true.

No one has topped them yet.