By Sagar V. Mankar 
Monster Hunter Wilds has roared onto Steam with an impressive 1.3 million concurrent players on launch day, breaking records and landing in the sixth spot on Steam’s all-time most-played games list.
This massive launch has made Monster Hunter Wilds the first Capcom game ever to cross the one million concurrent player mark on Steam. The numbers are pretty mind-blowing when you look at previous games in the series – Monster Hunter World peaked at 334,684 players, while Rise hit 231,360. Wilds has basically tripled those numbers right out of the gate.
The game has also toppled some big names in gaming. It surpassed Cyberpunk 2077‘s previous single-player game record of just over 1 million concurrent players and left Elden Ring’s peak of 953,426 players in the dust.
Top 10 all-time peak games on Steam:
- PUBG: Battlegrounds — 3,257,248 CCU
- Black Myth: Wukong — 2,415,714 CCU
- Palworld — 2,101,867 CCU
- Counter-Strike 2 — 1,818,773 CCU
- Lost Ark — 1,325,305 CCU
- Monster Hunter Wilds — 1,307,976 CCU
- Dota 2 — 1,295,114 CCU
- Cyberpunk 2077 — 1,054,388 CCU
- Elden Ring — 953,426 CCU
- Banana — 917,272 CCU
But it hasn’t been all smooth hunting. Despite this tremendous player influx, Monster Hunter Wilds has received a “Mixed” user review rating on Steam. The game currently sits at only 43% positive reviews out of more than 26,000 submitted. The primary complaint among negative reviews centers on technical performance issues, with many players reporting poor optimization for PC.
“This game is absolutely amazing – but has the worst optimisation I’ve ever seen,” one Steam user wrote. Another frustrated player added, “How does a game manage to run perfectly fine in the Open Beta AND I receive an Excellent rating score on the benchmark but the actual product that costs ACTUAL MONEY runs like absolute sludge.”
Capcom hasn’t ignored these complaints. They quickly jumped on X (formerly Twitter) with some advice: “Hunters! 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.”
The developer also released a detailed troubleshooting guide covering everything from graphics driver updates to compatibility mode fixes and file verification steps.
Despite the technical hiccups, critics have been pretty impressed with the game itself, giving it a solid 90/100 on Metacritic. 95% of critics on Open Critic recommended it, calling it “most exhilarating and refined Monster Hunter yet.”
With the weekend approaching, Monster Hunter Wilds could climb even higher up the Steam charts. While it probably won’t reach PUBG’s all-time record of 3.2 million players, it might challenge some other top contenders like Black Myth: Wukong (2.35 million) and Palworld (2 million).
The game is also available on PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S, meaning the total player count across all platforms is likely much higher than the Steam numbers alone.
Source: Steamdb