It looks like Capcom’s latest entry in the wildly popular Monster Hunter franchise is already gunning to be one of the biggest releases of the year, drawing in record numbers on Steam.
As I write this, Monster Hunter: Wilds has just peaked a staggering 1,065,140 concurrent players on Steam, and that number is still rising. It will likely grow even larger as we enter the weekend proper and more people get a chance to play.
To put that into some perspective, that’s enough to make Monster Hunter: Wilds the 7th biggest game on Steam in terms of concurrent players, beating Cyberpunk 2077 which has been relegated to 8th. Next up is DOTA2 at 1,295,114.
Top of the leaderboard is still PubG at 3.2 million, followed by Black Myth: Wukong at 2.4 million and Palworld at 2.1 million.
As for the other Monster Hunter games, Monster Hunter: World (2018) was the last mainline entry in the series and peaked at 334,684, while Monster Hunter: Rise (2023) hit 334,684.
Of course, it goes without saying that concurrent player counts do not directly equate to sales numbers. However, they are a fairly decent indicator of how popular a game is and Monster Hunter: World’s million plus players show that at least 1 million people have bought the game on Steam so far. On top of that, there’s the Xbox and PlayStation versions to account for, boosting the numbers even higher.
Unfortunately, there is some bad news as well as the game has launched to a “mixed” rating on Steam, currently based on over 6,000 reviews. Almost all of the reviews are praising the gameplay, but the biggest issue appears to be optimisation with a lot of negative reviews citing how badly the game is running. Interestingly, many of them note that the game ran fine for them during the beta and when using the seperate benchmarking tool.
As one user named Sgt. Walker Rhymes says: “very immersive game. you can cook a well-done steak on your GPU while you play and the hot blasts of air from your PC fans truly make you feel like you are in the desert. keep a bag of sand by your desk and periodically toss handfuls of it into the air to really complete the experience”
