How to watch CS2 demos
You can watch a CS2 demo in the game, from the Watch tab or with the playdemo command, or in 2D in your browser. The game shows the round through one player's eyes. A 2D viewer shows all ten players on the radar at once, which is quicker for review.
Sign in with Steam. Free right now, no signup form.
Your own matches, from the Watch tab
Open the Watch tab in the CS2 main menu and go to Your Matches. Your recent Premier and competitive matches are listed there. Click Download, wait for it to finish, then click Watch to play the whole match or pick a single round.
The list only holds your recent matches, and older demos can no longer be downloaded. Get the ones you want soon after you play.
Any demo file, with the console
Turn on the developer console first: Settings, Game, Enable Developer Console. Then open it with the ~ key, the key to the left of 1.
Put the .dem file in the game\csgo folder inside your CS2 install, and type playdemo followed by the file name. The install folder is still called Counter-Strike Global Offensive. If the demo came in an archive, unpack it first.
- Shift+F2 opens the demo playback controls, with pause, speed and a timeline.
- demo_timescale sets the speed: 2 is double speed, 0.5 is half.
- demo_togglepause pauses and resumes, which is handy on a key.
- demo_gototick jumps to a tick. CS2 runs 64 ticks a second, so 640 ticks is ten seconds.
In the game or in 2D?
In the game you see what one player saw: his crosshair placement, how he peeked, what he heard. That is the view for individual mistakes. For team review it is slow, because you keep switching players and lose the rest of the map.
A 2D replay puts all ten players, the grenades and the bomb on the radar. You see the whole round at once: who was where when it broke, who was close enough to trade and how late the rotation was.
Watching a demo in 2D on Subtick
Upload a .dem file, or a .bz2, .zst, .zip or .rar archive with demos inside, several at once and up to 2 GB each. Subtick parses the demo, then deletes the file. Nothing to install: it runs in your browser.
- Playback from 0.25× to 8×, with freeze time and quiet stretches skipped if you want.
- Smokes drawn from CS2's own smoke volume data, and molotov fires as they spread.
- Players on a lower floor are faded, so stacked spots stay readable.
- A review rail that jumps to opening kills, trades, clutches and the deaths nobody traded.
Pro matches without downloading anything
Pro matches on Subtick open in the same 2D viewer, free and without an account.
Questions
Where are CS2 demos saved?
Demos you download from the Watch tab go into the replays folder inside game\csgo in your CS2 install. To play a demo file from somewhere else with playdemo, put it in the game\csgo folder.
How do I open the demo controls in CS2?
Press Shift+F2 while a demo is playing.
How do I speed up a CS2 demo?
Use the speed control in the Shift+F2 panel, or type demo_timescale with a number in the console: 2 is double speed. In Subtick's 2D viewer you can play from 0.25× to 8× and skip freeze time.
Can I watch a CS2 demo without the game?
Yes, in 2D. Upload the demo to a browser viewer like Subtick's and every round plays on the radar. You only need CS2 to watch it from a player's view.