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A year ago, longtime Monster Hunter producer Ryozo Tsujimoto celebrated some major series milestones, including one very big number: 23 million. That’s how many copies of Monster Hunter: World Capcom had sold by early 2024 (including copies bundling in the game’s expansion, Iceborne). If you take a look on Capcom’s website, where it maintains a leaderboard of its bestselling games, World’s tacked on another 5 million sales since then. 28 million copies! That’s Capcom’s most successful game ever, across its 42-year history.
I can’t even fathom how much money Capcom is banking on Monster Hunter Wilds making (seriously, I’m not good enough at math to estimate what 30 million sales minus a 20-30% platform cut minus physical distribution costs filtered through yen-to-dollar-to-Euro-to-every-other-currency shakes out to in profit). But whatever amount of money it is, it’s the kind of number that makes you stop to count the zeroes, and that means the kind of pressure that would keep me lying awake at night in a flop sweat.
Tsujimoto, evidently, is made of sturdier stuff than I am.
“We’re very confident, and we do have high hopes that this game will do very well,” he told me through a translator in a recent interview. I asked Tsujimoto if he was nervous or confident with Wilds’ launch looming over him, and it didn’t seem like bluster when he said the latter.
“When we look at Monster Hunter World, the PC platform was released at a later date, and also crossplay was not available,” he said. “So there were things we couldn’t do in World, both gameplay-wise and system-wise, which Monster Hunter Wilds learned from. When we were early in development of Monster Hunter Wilds, the first thing we focused on was those elements that we needed to address so that it was an evolved Monster Hunter title. Not only has the environment evolved from Monster Hunter: World, but everything we felt like we needed to do—we feel that we were finally able to address with Monster Hunter Wilds. We are confident.”
Wilds seems poised for a mega launch on PC. As of this writing it’s hanging out in the top five of Steam’s global top sellers, just under the currently playable Civilization 7 and Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2. It’s the top-wishlisted game on Steam, period, edging out the long-awaited Hollow Knight: Silksong with more than 340,000 wishlists, according to SteamDB.
It’ll take huge sales on consoles and PC, though, to give Wilds a shot at World’s crown.
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Kurt Indovina
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