While only three months have passed since its release, Monster Hunter Wilds has witnessed a significant decline in concurrent players, dropping from over 318,000 average players in March to 21,781 in the past month. For games like Monster Hunter, it is not unusual for players to move on after finishing the main story and spending some time in the end game, occasionally coming back for updates and events. However, though this has been true for most Monster Hunter titles, and despite the game being considered a huge commercial success, with Capcom achieving record-high annual sales and profits thanks to it, data suggests that Monster Hunter Wilds is losing players much faster than its predecessors.
According to SteamCharts, the game peaked with 1,179,869 players around launch, however, that number dropped to 149,903 in May, and it is likely that the downwards trend will continue. As The Gamer points out, Wilds witnessed up to a 97% drop in players from its launch week peak, while in seven years since its release, Monster Hunter: World has never lost more than 92% of its launch week peak.
Looking at the comparative data, the player base of Monster Hunter: World and Rise is declining at a much slower pace than the player base of their successor, with a 14.08% drop in players for World and 37.67% drop for Rise in the past 30 days. Note that at the time of this article being written, Monster Hunter: World has around 3000 more concurrent players than Wilds. The Gamer brought up many points that could be a possible cause of the downward trend, including a surge of cheaters and gameplay/performance issues which resulted in its Steam rating being one of the lowest in the series’ history (57.43%).
While the numbers only show the current state of the Monster Hunter player base on Steam, we can assume that things have also been shaky for the PS5 port as well. An X post that went viral in Japan two weeks ago shows many copies of Monster Hunter Wilds being resold for almost half the price at a second-hand store. Many of the Japanese fans also seem discontent with the lack of content in the game.
However, since one of the major complaints players have at the moment is a lack of things to do, it’s likely that the upcoming major update featuring new monsters, layered weapons and other adjustments will invite a big portion of them to come back. The Free Title Update 2 is set to release in late June.
Monster Hunter Wilds is out now on PS5, Xbox Series X|S, and PC (Steam).
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