Capcom has launched an open beta for Monster Hunter Wilds. Judging by its metrics on Steam, the game has every chance of boosting the company’s financial performance upon launch.
The Monster Hunter Wilds open beta will run on PC, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X|S until November 4. It includes character creation, a story trial, and multiplayer with the Doshaguma hunt.
According to SteamDB, the free playtest peaked at 463,798 concurrent players, with hundreds of thousands of users logged into the game right now.
Despite an impressive start, many PC players faced technical issues with the Monster Hunter Wilds beta, experiencing frame drops and visual bugs that cause in-game models to appear low-poly. Capcom has already addressed the situation by providing a step-by-step troubleshooting guide.
It will be interesting to see whether Wilds can beat the all-time peaks of other games in the series at launch. Monster Hunter: World currently leads with 334.6k peak CCU, followed by Monster Hunter Rise (231.3k CCU).
While it is not fair to compare the free beta to already released premium titles, we can look at the concurrent player numbers of some other recent playtests on Steam. For example, the closed beta of Marvel Rivals peaked at 52.6k CCU earlier this year, while the multiplayer demo of Delta Force reached 39.7k CCU during the latest Next Fest. Some other examples include last year’s The Finals, which peaked at 267.8k CCU during its public playtest.
Unlike many of these titles, Monster Hunter is a well-established IP with cumulative sales of more than 100 million copies globally. It is the second best-selling franchise in Capcom’s portfolio, behind only Resident Evil (160 million).
That’s why Capcom is betting big on Monster Hunter Wilds, hoping it will help the company recover from its poor performance in the first half of FY24/25. The Japanese publisher recently reported a decline in both net sales and operating profit, expecting the figures to increase in H2 with the launch of Wilds.