Monster Hunter Wilds becomes only the 8th Steam game to hit 1 million concurrents, tripling Monster Hunter: World's all-time peak hours after launch

Update: Not long after we originally posted this story, Monster Hunter Wilds accumulated even more players on Steam, and has become the eighth game on the platform (ever) to reach 1 million concurrent players. At the time of writing, its latest peak (from minutes ago) was 1,133,679, which comfortably triples Monster Hunter: World's all-time peak, and pushes Wilds up to seventh in SteamDB's all-time concurrent player chart. It's also the first Capcom game to pass 1 million simultaneous Steam players.

Original story: Monster Hunter Wilds has had a phenomenal debut on Steam, hitting a concurrent player peak of almost 1 million and breaking into the top 10 all-time player peaks in its first hour.

Capcom's new action RPG finally released today, and on PC, it immediately opened its doors to 880,806 players, according to data from SteamDB. That quickly spiked even higher, with the game hitting 987,482 concurrent players within the hour. For comparison, Monster Hunter: World's all-time Steam peak was 334,684 at launch, so Wilds has nearly tripled that.

This is already impressive, but it's even more wild (if you'll excuse the pun) when you consider what time of day this was. The peak was at 6am UTC, which is 10pm PT or 1am ET. I can't blame any Monster Hunter fans for diving in as soon as possible, but it seems very likely that the peak is going to go even higher this weekend when fewer players have work-shaped responsibilities to get up for.

Looking at SteamDB's all-time concurrent player chart, Monster Hunter Wilds is currently eighth in the ranking, below the likes of Cyberpunk 2077, Dota 2, Palworld, and Black Myth: Wukong, but surpassing Elden Ring, which has now been pushed into ninth place. Again, Monster Hunter Wilds' place is probably subject to change over the next couple of days, so we'll just have to watch this space to see if it can climb even higher.

At the end of last year, Monster Hunter Wilds' first open beta test brought in almost half a million concurrent players on PC, which was already incredible. Obviously, none of these figures account for console players, so the actual number of people slashing and stabbing monsters then and now is undoubtedly much higher than these numbers let on.

If you were on the fence at all, we were full of praise for the action RPG in our Monster Hunter Wilds review. We said it has "the best combat and narrative in a 20-year series," making it "the new peak of Monster Hunter."

Diving into the latest Monster Hunter game yourself? Be sure to check out our guide to the best Monster Hunter Wilds weapons.