Monster Hunter Wilds propels Steam to highest ever player count
Steam hit another new player record this weekend, with more than 40 million people online at the same time.
Last Friday was, of course, the launch of Monster Hunter Wilds – which soared to a peak of more than 1.38 million concurrent players on Saturday night. That same total was then repeated on Sunday, when a peak of 1.37 million concurrent players jumped back into the game.
Currently, Monster Hunter Wilds is the second-most played game on Steam, behind evergreen Counter-Strike 2, but ahead of other stalwarts such as PUBG and Dota 2.
Monster Hunter Wilds has clearly been a huge hit, with a Steam play count three times higher than any previous Monster Hunter game, let alone anything else publisher Capcom has ever launched, Resident Evil included.
It’s not all been plain sailing for the game, however. User reviews for Monster Hunter Wilds remain “Mixed” on Steam, with only 53 percent of players currently saying they’d recommend the game, and a fair amount of criticism for its technical performance on PC right now.
Digital Foundry echoed that on Friday, going as far as saying the team “can’t recommend the PC version” as “substantial technical problems must be addressed”.
“To sum up, lower-end graphics cards with lower VRAM allocations should avoid Monster Hunter Wilds until these issues are rectified,” Digital Foundry’s Alex Battaglia wrote. “Higher-end hardware can brute-force the game’s shortcomings to some degree, but it’s still hard to recommend such a flawed technical outing – or even derive optimised settings.”
Other criticism has surfaced for the series’ need to pay if you want to keep changing your Monster Hunter Wilds character – though you do get one edit for free.
