This weekend, the ESL Pro Tour Masters Championship stops at Poland’s Spodek arena for three days of Counter-Strike: Global Offensive and StarCraft II matches in the Intel Extreme Masters Katowice 2020. The arena can hold 11,500 spectators but while IEM Katowice sold out, it has no crowd. Last night, barely 15 hours before the event started, Polish authorities revoked its mass event license due to concerns about that there coronavirus. The matches are still going ahead, just with no spectators. ESL say they will refund IEM tickets but can’t refund travel and accommodation costs.

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While Counter-Strike has long seemed one of those games that might just have found its final form and will now be around forever, I am surprised that it’s still breaking its own records. Over the weekend, Counter-Strike: Global Offensive set a new record for the number of people in-game online at the same time, beating a record set in April 2016. That was back before CS:GO went free-to-play, mind, but it’s taken a year for free CS to climb up and topple that mighty record. 901,681 players on Sunday, that’s the new high.

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We’ve been there. You’re rushing long-A on Dust, asking for smoke cover, but the response is deadlier than any digital gunshot. A high-pitched wail ruptures your headset, puncturing eardrums and shattering glass. Your monitor’s ruined. When the dust settles and the ringing stops, the comms are wild with name-calling, homophobic slurs and swears that’d make a sailor blush. But mic screamers beware. Counter-Strike: Global Offensive is about to take action against abusive communications by automatically muting troublesome teammates.

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Crikey, glad that’s over. It looked like we’d lost Steam for a couple of hours. Today’s outage not only affected store listings, community pages, friends lists and workshop access, but also took several of Valve’s lovely multiplayer gunshoots/wizard bashers/hat-acquirers offline. Countless poor Steam users were forced to do other things with their time – playing their Steam games alone, going elsewhere for their online kicks, or perhaps even stepping away from their computers entirely to make a nice cuppa.

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Below you’ll find the list of the best PC games we recommend you play right now. These are games that are new, that are being freshly updated, or that are stone cold classics of their respective genres. This is a living list, which means we’ll be updating it throughout 2020 as we fall in love with new games.

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It’s been an eventful decade for PC games, and it would be hard for you to summarise everything that’s happened in the medium across the past ten years. Hard for you>, but a day’s work for us. Below you’ll find our picks for the 50 best games released on PC across the past decade.

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Algorithms aren’t the answer to everything, but they can help you catch Counter-Strike: Global Offensive cheaters. A teenager going by “2Eggs” has apparently identified 14,000 of the buggers, knocking together an AI that can analyse reports of potential cheaters in a fraction of the time it would take a human. He’s called it HestiaNet, after the Greek goddess “of hearth and fire”. I’m happy enough for the over-performing bedroom AI to have a grandiose name, even though that number might have more to do with Valve’s own software than Eggs’es.

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Counter-Strike: Global Offensive has never been all that interested in world-building. It’s an esport: the pro players are the real characters, inhabiting faceless Terrorists and Counter-Terrorists in high stakes matches where every bullet counts. Operation Shattered Web mixes things up, bringing a host of new player skins with CS:GO’s first-ever battle pass. Now, you can stride through time-worn battlefields as a gruff n’ tough special-force veteran or notorious global criminal of your choosing.

Unless you want to be a woman. There’s only one of those.

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The best shooters endure. While other genres warp beyond recognition, there is something solid about the first-person shooter that makes it as dependable as a nice big AK-47. Maybe it s the gung-ho simplicity – look down a barrel and pull the trigger. It’s as fun to fire a double-barrelled shotgun from an early 90s FPS as the slick shotties of today. For that reason, this list runs the gamut from genre classics to those released in the last year. There’s bound to be something for you in this, our list of the best 50 FPS games on PC. Let s lock and/or load.

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From today, Counter-Strike: Global Offensive‘s loot box keys can no longer be resold on Steam’s marketplace. Valve are putting a lock on their keys because of the global gangs of evil-doers who were using the keys to launder money. From now on, any key bought will be bound to the purchaser’s account.

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