Monster Hunter: World's PC launch is easily the largest ever for a Japanese game on Steam
Monster Hunter: World launched on Steam yesterday with a solid if unremarkable port. We've been dusting off our greatswords and gathering our Steam groups together with the long-awaited PC launch of what is already Capcom's best selling game to date. It should come as no surprise that the game seems to bit a hit on PC as well, but the extent of the success was somehow more pronounced than many people expected.
According to Steam Charts, Monster Hunter: World is currently the fourth most popular game on the service only behind juggernauts like PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds, Dota 2, and Counter-Strike: Global Offensive. Yesterday, it hit an all-time peak of a whopping 290,656 players. To put that in perspective, that easily dwarfs Capcom's second-highest game on the service Dragon's Dogma, which topped out at a 27,259 concurrent player peak. Resident Evil 6, Resident Evil 7, and Street Fighter V all sit at concurrent peaks below 20,000 players. While this comparison is not perfect, Dragon's Dogma is available DRM-free on GOG for instance, it still shows the large disparity between Monster Hunter's debut amongst its peers.
Monster Hunter: World even manages to double up Dark Souls III, which saw a (now seemingly paltry) 130,000 consecutive player peak when it launched in early 2016.
When an exploit in the Steam API allowed savvy data miners to extract extremely accurate data from the service earlier this summer, it was revealed that both Dark Souls: Prepare to Die Edition and Dark Souls III had sold about 3.3 million copies on the service up to July 2018 via Ars Technica. It will be interesting to see how much the disparity in concurrent players reflects in the eventual sell-through for Monster Hunter: World. We have a feeling it's going to be a big number. A visual representation really puts it all in perspective.
Getting started with (or revisiting) Monster Hunter: World on PC? We have a ton of guides available for browsing here.