How to download a CS2 demo (matchmaking, Premier, Faceit)
Every competitive CS2 match is recorded server-side as a demo — a .dem file replaying the whole game. Valve and Faceit both let you download yours, and those files are the raw material for any serious aim analysis. Here is where to find them.
Matchmaking & Premier (in the CS2 client)
- Open CS2 and go to the Watch tab.
- Select Your Matches — recent Premier and competitive games are listed there.
- Click the download arrow on a match. The demo is fetched to your game folder; when it finishes you can also watch it in-client.
The downloaded file lands inside your CS2 installation, typically:
C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\
Counter-Strike Global Offensive\game\csgo\replays\Demos stay downloadable for a limited time (roughly a month), so grab the matches you care about early. If the list is empty, play a matchmaking or Premier game first — casual modes are not always recorded.
Valve also exposes each match as a share link (right-click a match → copy share code/link). Those links serve the same demo as a compressed .dem.bz2 — you do not need to unpack it for AimFinder, see below.
Faceit
- Open the match room of the game you want (Faceit site or client).
- On the match page, use the Watch demo / Download demo button.
- Faceit serves a compressed
.dem.gzfile — usually 50–150 MB.
Demo availability on Faceit is also time-limited, and very old matches may have no demo at all.
What to do with the file
You can watch it in CS2 (Watch tab → Downloaded, or the playdemo console command) — useful, but reviewing kills frame by frame by hand takes hours per match.
Or let a parser do the frame-by-frame work: upload the file to the AimFinder demo analyzer and it reconstructs every kill — flick size, overshoot or undershoot, correction time, crosshair placement — then derives the sensitivity your aim actually performs best at. It accepts .dem files directly and the compressed forms you just downloaded: .dem.bz2 (matchmaking share links), .dem.gz (Faceit) and .zip, up to 400 MB. No unzipping needed.
One match is a decent first look; two or three recent matches give the per-kill statistics enough volume to be trustworthy — see what demo analysis can and cannot measure for why sample size matters.
Privacy note
A demo contains the whole match (all ten players), but nothing from your computer — no settings, no hardware info, no mouse data. AimFinder parses the file on its server, keeps only the per-kill aim numbers for your player, and deletes the file itself right after parsing (details in the privacy policy).