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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.