Wildcard needed a good week in Portugal. It didn't get one.
The North American Counter-Strike team finished fifth-sixth at FOX Legacy Season 1. On paper, that sounds respectable. In the context of the race for the PGL Singapore Major, it hurts. According to projections calculated by Mischief, Wildcard's estimated chance of qualifying fell from 39% before the event to 24% after it. That's a drop of well over a third, and it came at a point in the season where every placement counts.
The good news, if you're a Wildcard fan, is that the door hasn't closed. The team still has two LAN events left on its calendar. The bad news is that the margin for error has almost disappeared.
Counter-Strike 2 is still one of the biggest games on Steam. But "still big" and "still growing" are not the same thing, and right now CS2 is only managing the first.
According to dust2.us, the game's average player count dropped again in September 2026, landing at roughly 805,000. That makes it the seventh month in a row that the average has gone down, and the lowest monthly figure since February 2024. On its own, one bad month wouldn't mean much. Seven in a row looks like a trend.
A streak nobody wanted
The streak is the notable part. Per the dust2.us report, no stretch of falling averages this long has happened before, across both CS2 and its predecessor, CS:GO. That covers a lot of history, so this is not a quiet blip in the margins. September isn't an outlier. It's the latest step in a slide that has been building since early in the year.
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