Monster Hunter Wilds is out and off to a roaring start on Steam, already shattering previous records to become the series’ most-played PC launch to date. And that’s all despite one of the lowest Steam review scores of any recent blockbuster, due to optimization, performance issues, and other complaints.
Officially the first massive release of 2025, Monster Hunter Wilds garnered over 700,000 concurrent players on Steam alone last night, peaking at 1.3 million and continuing to grow. It could seemingly double that by the time the weekend hits, putting it number one over the ubiquitous Counter-Strike 2 and potentially even beating out both Black Myth: Wukong and Palworld for the all-time number 2 spot on the Valve-owned storefront. This is walloping the performance of previous games in the series: Monster Hunter World peaked at around 330,000 concurrent players, and Monster Hunter Rise’s all-time peak was 230,000.
It’s certainly shaping up to be a breakout moment for Capcom’s dense and fiddley action-RPG then, which is even more surprising given how dismal its initial Steam reviews have been. It currently has a rating of just 47 percent, with the majority of reviews giving Monster Hunter Wilds a thumbs down over PC problems. We’ve seen negative backlash on the platform over rough PC launches before, most notably 2023’s Star Wars Jedi: Survivor which struggled throughout the year despite several big patches. But rarely do those same games then go on to break franchise and Steam records.
It might be because many of the reviews read like this: “This game is absolutely amazing – but has the worst optimization I’ve ever seen.” A common thread is that players who had no real problems with the game’s pre-launch open betas are now struggling to get decent framerates at higher resolutions. “If I can run KCD2 and Cyberpunk on maxed out settings comfortably, then there is no reason this game should be running like this,” another review reads. Others were more glib. “I paid 70 dollars to boot a crash report,” wrote one person. “My grandma runs better than this game,” wrote another.
It sounds like the experience can be quite rough for many players, from lots of pop-in to frequent framerate stuttering when moving the camera around the big world (although there are certainly some on older graphics cards saying they’re getting along just fine). As with everything on PC, it’s hard to know how much of this needs to be sorted out on Capcom’s end vs. players fiddling with their own drivers and settings to get better results out of their hardware. Digital Foundry’s assessment didn’t mince words though with a video titled “Profound perf problems must be addressed.” Capcom has so far responded with the usual troubleshooting guide.
That said, Monster Hunter Wilds certainly doesn’t look perfect on PlayStation 5 either. A Digital Foundry analysis there showed how the game can look very muddy at higher framerates. I spent most of my time with the game during my review playing at a less fluid, more cinematic 30fps for exactly that reason. On the whole though, I’ve experienced no bugs or crashes in my 40 hours with the game on console so far.
We’ll see how much of this can be addressed in post-launch updates and how much of it is baked into the game at a more fundamental level. Monster Hunter Wilds is Capcom’s first entry in the franchise on the RE engine it uses for Resident Evil (and most other games at this point). It could also be a reflection of just how dense bespoke monster animations and interactions are in the game. It’s nowhere near as immediately dazzling as, say, Horizon Forbidden West, but there’s a liveliness and vibrancy on display few other games have shown us. Either way, it seems like Monster Hunter Wilds could be this year’s Helldivers 2 when it comes to being an online multiplayer phenomenon.
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