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Comment by ViktorRay | Hacker News Reader

Thanks for sharing this! Very interesting!

I believe de_dust2 is likely still the most played FPS map. Not sure which other map could have dethroned it. It can’t be Fortnite since Fortnite changes the map every few months and nowadays makes a new one every year or so.

I guess Blood Gulch from the time when Halo was super popular was a very popular map as well.

Then you also have 2fort from the Team Fortress games.

But yes I would say de_dust2 is very likely still the most played FPS map and it will likely stay that way.

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The only other map that started in a non-CS game that I think has even a slightly close level of fame would be COD Nuketown.

As much as I love all the maps you mentioned, and could probably sketch their layouts from memory, I think Rust and Nuketown from the call of duty series are probably better known by a wide margin. Rust has been featured in 3 different games that had a combined sales of over 2 billion dollars, but even that is small peanuts compared to Nuketown.

Nuketown has been featured in six different games, with 17 total variants of the map existing, and 8 different game modes that are Nuketown maps 24/7.

I’ve played neither Counterstrike nor Call of Duty, but I know de_dust2 by name and can even visualise what it looks like, and I’ve never heard of Rust or Nuketown.

Yeah, same was true of me until a couple of years ago when I started playing call of duty with my younger brother to reconnect. At least for me, PC gaming puts me in a massive filter bubble in terms of what you see and hear about, and call of duty, which overwhelmingly sells to consoles, has always been viewed sort of derogatorily.

I think on the flip side, most of my brother's friends I played Call of Duty with probably haven't heard of counterstrike, or Quake, or unreal tournament.

Rust was more of a brawl map than the others. Lots of 1v1 fights, but no where close to the playtime of the other two.

If we count the Nuketown map on Call of Duty mobile (mobile has over a billion downloads) I would have to say that's the winner, but if not de_dust2 is the king. Mirage would also be pretty up there.

cs skins are pulling in a billion a year nowadays.

Yeah, the CS skin market is pretty crazy, but its still no where near CoD sized. Black ops 6 turned over $3 billion in revenue, and black ops 7 is expected to sell higher yet.

I find the yearly release model exhausting, honestly. Some people only play Call of Duty and still spend more per year than I do on video games.

By "six different games" do you mean six practically identical re-releases of the same game?

Man if you saw the endless wailing and gnashing of teeth about every single change that happens iteration to iteration you'd be astounded.

The two subfranchises, modern warfare and black ops do generally feel substantially different though. Modern warfare is generally a slog, but black ops can be quite zoomy, especially now that Raven software is working on them.

That's just gaming. It doesn't matter what developers do, some portion of the playerbase will be mad about it. Nerf a thing, someone gets mad, don't nerf it someone else gets mad. I'm sure some people will get mad at both options.

COD can be fun, but to me it gets boring quickly.

Yeah 2fort damn, servers been running 2fort only games 24/7 for decades...

I feel like halo was never really big outside the US, I would guess unreal tournament, quake, DoD, CoD, battlefield, all were quite popular in the whole west

Halo was defiantly big outside of the US. I was prime age for gaming when Halo came out and Halo was the most talked about game and everybody loved it.

The X-Box was less common as the first X-Box never really sold all that well. But Halo came out for the PC as well and many people played it.

Halo wasn't even ported to the PC until 2003, and wasn't well regarded or played much.

It even had a Mac port. Supported both PowerPC and Intel! Though yeah--I'm not sure how many players it had. It's just neat that it happened.

I have fond memories of 2fort. Desperately wanting to play TF1 on a 14.4K modem from Germany - no European servers meant playing with 500ms ping, which made aiming completely impossible, so I took the pacifist route each time by picking the scout class and then trying to steal the flag unnoticed by coming in through the sewers. It worked sometimes when the server was only half full.

I would just play as medic and camp the enemy spawn room, infecting them as they spawned and watch as they passively infected their teammates. It was great fun (I have since grown as a person). It wasn't long before the enemy spawn rooms would instantly kill you if you entered.

FY_iceworld maybe, if we count number of rounds played?

q3dm17?

q3dm6

fy_pool_day

Poolday was definitely a de

was de but named fy and no one planted anything :D

My absolute favorite was always fy_pool_party_v2 I think it was called. Such a perfect map. Every position had a number of elite advantages but also drawbacks.

There have been days where 40M people played Fortnite on a single day. I'm kinda out of the gaming world a bit, but I did not believe when my nephew mentioned it, but it checked out. Given the age range of people who still actively play it, I'm not sure if they've even heard of de_dust2.

I pine for a time pre-CS, pre-QWTF when dm4 would have been top dog in the most played map.

We probably had more fun on death32c though.

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