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Monster Hunter Wilds‘ first month has been a right corker, as Capcom revealed it managed to shift over 10 million copies in the game’s opening weeks.
Around eight million of those were just in the first three days of launch, making it the fastest-selling Capcom game in the developer’s history. So while things have slowed down outside the initial hype, an extra two million copies in the following weeks is still no small feat.
Those numbers already put Wilds incredibly close to 2021’s Monster Hunter Rise, which hit a milestone of 15 million copies sold last May. I wouldn’t be surprised if Wilds manages to surpass that number before the year is out.
It’s not quite at Monster Hunter: World level yet, though—that game’s reported to have shifted just shy of 30 million copies before Wilds released. But considering it took World seven years to get there, it’s cool to see Wilds managing over a third of that in a fraction of the time. I’m sure the fact that Monster Hunter Wilds is the first one in the series to launch simultaneously on console and PC has helped massively in that regard.
It’s not known exactly how many of Wilds’ players are playing on PC, though we do have a rough idea. Industry analyst Mat Piscatella reported that over half of the game’s sales came from Steam, and SteamDB’s owner estimations are working in the range of 4.77 million to 6.46 million people owning the game on PC.
That’s in spite of the fact that the game is currently sitting at a Mixed rating on Steam, with a 63% overall positive rating at the time of writing. Most of the negative reviews are thanks to a slew of performance issues and some shoddy optimisation—Capcom recommends running Wilds with frame gen on just to hit 60 fps, a feature that isn’t even available on pre-40 series GPUs, for example—as well as criticisms around how obtuse multiplayer can be (an opinion shared by our own Fraser Brown) sprinkled in among some more thorough critiques.
That does make me wonder how many of these sales are people who’ve double-dipped, jumping to their PS5 for a more stable experience. In actuality it’s probably an incredibly small percentage, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it was a bigger number than I expected.
Ultimately, I feel like this really is a great testament to how far Monster Hunter has come. What was once a fairly niche series, spending years shackled to handhelds before World burst onto the scene in 2018, has become a juggernaut that smashed sales records, became one of the most-played Steam games of all time in its first 24 hours, and cemented itself as a mainstream experience.
I’m sure sales will only continue to roll in as Capcom pushes out its title updates, too. The first one’s actually arriving this week, on April 4, adding monster Mizutsune, a gathering hub, and the ability to rematch the story’s final boss.
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Kurt Indovina
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