In a newly released financial report, developer Capcom confirms that the Monster Hunter series has been doing well in the run-up to Monster Hunter Wilds, with some 3 million players jumping into Monster Hunter World and Rise, as well as their expansions, Iceborne and Sunbreak, in the past six months.
The report offers a temperature check of the first half of Capcom's ongoing fiscal year, and the data that grabs me most is on page eight of the company's financial presentation. The top four best-selling Capcom titles of the past six months are all Monster Hunter, beating other contenders like Resident Evil 4, Street Fighter 6, Devil May Cry 5 oddly enough, and Dragon's Dogma 2. Here's the full breakdown:
- Monster Hunter World - 1.764 million copies
- Monster Hunter World: Iceborne - 1.444 million copies
- Monster Hunter Rise - 1.365 million copies
- Monster Hunter Rise: Sunbreak - 1.152 million copies
In total, that's just over 5.7 million copies of Monster Hunter sold, and that's only looking at these four titles. You do of course need the base games to play the Iceborne or Sunbreak expansions, so if we're just focusing on unique purchases, the total would be closer to 3.1 million players between World and Rise.
- Capcom promises "this is just the start for the next generation of Monster Hunter" as Wilds shatters sales milestones: "The Guild authorizes this celebration!"
- Monster Hunter Wilds breaks a Capcom record as the action RPG passes 8 million sales in 3 days, "the fastest a title has reached this milestone in the company's history"
There's no good way for us to account for outliers like double-dip multi-platform purchases, but these numbers collectively demonstrate that a whole lot of people have been hunting monsters – most, likely for the first time in these games – in the past six months. Some were doubtlessly attracted by plentiful discounts across all platforms as well as Capcom's promotional events.
"Regarding catalog titles, sales of Monster Hunter World: Iceborne and Monster Hunter Rise continued to grow, contributing to the improvement of the brand, with cumulative sales of the series surpassing 100 million units worldwide," Capcom says in a separate writeup. World and Rise collectively chipped in nearly half of that volume despite being just a few years old.
With the Monster Hunter Wilds beta upon us, in PlayStation Plus early access at least, the reality of a new entry in the series is finally starting to set in. As a more direct follow-up to Monster Hunter World and the first multi-platform crossplay launch in the series, Wilds is at least poised to set some monstrous records when it launches February 28, 2025.
