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Action-focused gameplay defines Counter-Strike, a Valve-developed and published title from 2000. With 168,261 Steam reviews at 97% positive and a $9.99 initial price, it stands out as a budget action game with unusually strong long-term player approval.
Overview
Counter-Strike is a 2000 Action game developed by Valve and published by Valve. On Steam it has gathered 168,280 player reviews, 97% of them positive, which counts as a overwhelmingly positive reception among indie titles in the Action category. The game is available on linux, mac, windows, and launched at $10. The pairing of developer Valve with publisher Valve is one of the studio-publisher relationships indielist tracks, letting players find comparable games and letting developers and investors study how Action projects reach the market. indielist's white-box method estimates its lifetime sales at roughly 8.6 million to 20.0 million units, with the full Boxleiter factor breakdown shown on this page rather than a single black-box figure. Within indielist's catalog of indie games mapped to their studios, publishers, and funding, Counter-Strike can be compared against similar Action titles and benchmarked on review counts and estimated sales.
Reviews
168,280
Positive
97%
Steam appid
10
Engine
Unknown
Sales estimate
vv1.08.6M to 20.0M
units (median: 14.3M)
≈ $49.0M to $114.3M net revenue (Steam cut + refunds + regional discount applied)
+ - How is this calculated?
| Factor | Adjustment |
|---|---|
| base | +50 |
| year_2000 | +30 |
| price_$10 | -5 |
| positive_97% | +10 |
| final NB | 85 |
Confidence range: median × [0.6, 1.4]. Boundary protection: NB ∈ [15, 150].
Methodology & limitations
Sales estimates use a multi-factor Boxleiter method against public Steam review counts.
They are not authoritative sales data. Actual sales can deviate by
±50% in either direction. Free-to-play games, deeply discounted titles, and games
with heavy bundle distribution have larger error margins. Algorithm version
v1.0.
indielist estimates lifetime unit sales for Counter-Strike at roughly 8.6 million to 20.0 million copies, with a median around 14.3 million, derived from its 168,280 Steam reviews using a multi-factor Boxleiter method (version v1.0). That median maps to approximately $81.6M in net revenue after Steam's 30% cut, regional pricing, and refunds. Unlike black-box trackers, the full calculation is shown on this page: a base review-to-sales multiplier is adjusted for release year, launch price, review sentiment, studio size, and genre, and every adjustment is listed so developers, publishers, and investors can audit exactly how the figure was reached. The range itself reflects genuine uncertainty — review-to-sales ratios vary widely between games — so indielist publishes a low, median, and high band rather than a false-precision single number, and treats free-to-play, heavily discounted, and bundle-distributed titles as having wider error margins still.
Price history
90d · low $5.38Over the last 90 days the price ranged from $5.38 to $9.99, averaging $9.35 across 2 discount windows, with a historical low of $5.38 on 2026-04-28.
Synthetic series for demo. Real ITAD price history loads after Day 3 ingest.
Where to buy
Affiliate disclosure- Steam reference
- Green Man Gaming
- Fanatical
- Humble Store
- GOG.com
Live prices land as our store feeds sync; links go straight to each store. Some are affiliate links — we may earn a commission at no extra cost to you. Learn more.
Platforms
linuxmacwindows
Genres
Frequently asked questions
- How many copies has Counter-Strike sold?
- indielist estimates Counter-Strike has sold between 8,582,280 and 20,025,320 units (median 14,303,800), derived from its 168,280 Steam reviews with the white-box Boxleiter vv1.0 method. The full breakdown is shown on the page.
- Who developed Counter-Strike?
- Counter-Strike was developed by Valve and published by Valve.
- When was Counter-Strike released?
- Counter-Strike was released in 2000.
- How many reviews does Counter-Strike have on Steam?
- Counter-Strike has 168,280 Steam reviews, of which 97% are positive.
Ecosystem
indielist positions Counter-Strike within the Action segment so players can surface comparable titles by shared tags and genre rather than by storefront promotion. On the developer side, Valve's other releases and Valve's wider catalog are one click away, letting developers benchmark where Counter-Strike sits among a studio's body of work and how its publisher's portfolio performs. Because indielist maps studios, publishers, games, and funding into one connected graph, the same Counter-Strike page serves three audiences at once: players hunting their next Action game, developers studying how comparable projects were positioned and what they sold, and investors tracing which teams and labels are active in the space. A machine-readable markdown mirror of this page is published at the same path with a .md suffix for AI assistants, and its review, price, and sales-estimate figures are refreshed on a schedule rather than frozen at launch.