sortiwa
In brief: Monster Hunter, a franchise that once struggled to spread beyond its core Japanese audience on the PSP, is now Capcom’s most successful intellectual property. The latest release, Monster Hunter Wilds, has broken records on Steam and for the company as a whole within 24 hours of launch. Its peak player count almost quadruples the franchise’s previous mainline entry.
Monster Hunter Wilds peaked at around 1.3 million concurrent players on Steam approximately 12 hours after its release, becoming the first Capcom title to exceed one million, according to SteamDB. The game immediately left the company’s previous releases in the dust, like Capcom Arcade Stadium with 488,791 players and Monster Hunter: World with 334,684.
In Steam’s all-time peak player count ranking, Monster Hunter Wilds has already beaten hits like Dota 2, Cyberpunk 2077, Elden Ring, and Marvel Rivals. Most notably, Capcom’s multiplayer survival action game already has over 40 mods, totaling over 10,000 downloads.
Its success on Steam is only the tip of the iceberg. These numbers don’t include the majority of users playing the game on PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series consoles. Hilariously, Palworld developer Pocketpair gave employees the day off after many called in sick on the day Monster Hunter Wilds launched.
The game’s success on Steam appears unaffected by its severe performance issues on PC. Steep system requirements that encouraged players to use frame generation to reach 60 frames per second were an early sign of trouble, but problems have since escalated.
Digital Foundry reports that Monster Hunter Wilds immediately urges players to engage frame generation upon starting. Additionally, the game suffers from mysterious stuttering issues and slow texture compression. Capcom’s implementation of DirectStorage might be the cause, but some users suspect Denuvo’s infamous anti-tampering software.
Customers building a new gaming rig should also note that AMD started bundling Monster Hunter Wilds with several of its Ryzen CPUs, Radeon graphics cards, and a few pre-built systems. The promotion applies to high-end RX 7000 series GPUs and discounted Ryzen 9000 processors that, unfortunately, don’t include 3D V-Cache. Team Red is likely using Capcom’s success to clear inventory as it launches the Radeon RX 9000 series cards.
Source link