Capcom’s Monster Hunter Wilds drives Steam to historic 40 million concurrent user peak
Capcom’s game also hit a peak of nearly 1.4 million, putting it 5th in Steam’s all-time charts
For the first time in its history, more than 40 million people were playing games on Steam this weekend.
Steam‘s stats page stated that at around 2pm GMT on Sunday, the total number of concurrent Steam users hit a peak of 40,275,012.
This is not only the highest peak ever recorded on the platform, but also the first time the peak has crossed 40 million concurrent users.
A notable portion of these users were playing Monster Hunter Wilds, which hit a peak of more than 1.38 million players on Saturday, according to SteamDB.
This made it the eighth game in Steam’s history to ever pass 1 million concurrent players, and put it fifth in its all-time charts of the highest all-time peak reached by a single game, bettering the likes of Elden Ring, Cyberpunk 2077 and Dota 2.
It still has some way to go, however, to beat the all-time concurrent peaks of Counter-Strike 2 (1.6 million), Palworld (2.1 million), Black Myth: Wukong (2.4 million) and PUBG Battlegrounds (3.2 million)
Despite its overwhelming initial success on Steam, the PC version of Monster Hunter Wilds continues to have a mixed response from players complaining about its performance.
The game currently still has mixed reviews on Steam, with only 57% of the more than 56,000 user reviews on the service marked as ‘positive’.
Many players are complaining that the game performs worse than it should on their particular setup, with Digital Foundry stating this weekend that the PC version has “profound performance problems” which “must be addressed”.
In a video showing severe frame rate dips on a relatively high-powered rig, Digital Foundry’s Alex Battaglia stated: “I have no idea why an arid desert with nothing in it is running like this. A lot of games that look better run a lot better. “As a result, on a technical level, I don’t recommend playing this game on a lower-end GPU until it is patched, as I cannot derive optimised settings at the moment without serious concessions to visual quality that just don’t make sense.”
Last week Capcom responded to players complaining about PC performance issues by suggesting: “If you’re experiencing any initial issues with Monster Hunter Wilds on Steam, please try updating your graphics driver, turning off compatibility mode, and then readjust your settings.”
In a linked post on the Monster Hunter support website, Capcom has suggested several steps that could fix the issues, including updating drivers, adding the game’s folder and files to a player’s anti-virus exception list, and more.
