Monster Hunter Wilds hits nearly 1 million concurrent Steam players, despite mixed reviews on performance
Less than half of the Steam reviews for Monster Hunter Wilds are currently positive
Monster Hunter Wilds nearly hit 1 million concurrent Steam players on its release day, but not everyone is happy with the game yet.
According to SteamDB, the game – which launched five hours ago at the time of writing – currently has an all-time peak of 987,482, a figure which may be overtaken as the weekend approaches.
This instantly puts the game in 8th place in terms of all-time peaks on Steam, ahead of such titles as Elden Ring, Hogwarts Legacy, Baldur’s Gate 3, Marvel Rivals and Apex Legends.
It also puts it just behind Cyberpunk 2077, which has an all-time peak of 1.054 million, just 67,000 ahead of Monster Hunter Wilds.
The figure is also siginificantly higher than the all-time peaks of its predecessors Monster Hunter World (which hit an all-time peak of 334,684) and Monster Hunter Rise (231,360), a statistic which will no doubt bode well for Capcom‘s sales expectations.
The publisher may be less pleased by the initial reaction to the PC version, however, which currently sits at ‘Mixed’ reviews according to the game’s Steam page.
While many appear to be loving the game, others have been complaining about performance on PC, with some claiming that even with relatively powerful setups they’re struggling to get smooth gameplay out of it.
“I understand that new games are becoming more demanding and people are expected to upgrade, but this is absurd,” wrote reviewer Koda, who has four hours of gameplay on record. “I’m aware this isn’t the first instance of new games having poor performance on launch, because the same thing happened with World, but it feels inexcusable at this point. I am by no means saying the game is bad, but in its current state, you should probably consider waiting for a more stable release.”
ThatTwistedMetalGuy, who also has four hours on record, wrote: “This game is so horribly optimized. The last launch I had an experience like this with was Cyberpunk. Frame gen will give you your FPS with HORRID ghosting. Upscaling hammers CPU while barely touching GPU.
“1080p offers 10-20FPS increase over 4k without frame gen. Game looks like an oil painting and just flat out refuses to load some textures on high and my card has 16GB of VRAM, no where near maxing out the games requirements on High. This is a huge disappointment.”
Other reviews, like that of Tankobino (3.5 hours), state that the game’s Open Beta ran “perfectly fine” with an “excellent rating score on the benchmark” but that the final game “runs like absolute sludge”, suggesting that this is an issue that may at least be patchable for some players.
Despite this, other players on X have been reporting that the game runs even better for them on PC than the Open Beta did, meaning it appears the situation is less cut-and-dry and may depend on each player’s individual setup.
The game’s system requirements recommend at least an Nvidia GeForce RTX 2060 Super or AMD Radeon RX 6600 with 8GB of VRAM, as well as 16GB of RAM.
Last month Capcom stated that while its net profits for the first nine months of this fiscal year have been down 33% year-on-year, it still expects to hit its 12-month forecast of better net profit than last fiscal year, because of Monster Hunter Wilds.
VGC’s five-star Monster Hunter Wilds review, which was played on PS5 Pro, calls it “a victory lap for Capcom’s golden age”, concluding: “Monster Hunter Wilds is confident, bold, and one of the best Monster Hunter games ever, thanks to its ability to stand on the giant shoulders of Worlds and improve it in virtually every way.”
