Monster Hunter Wilds has reached a concurrent player count of over 1 million at launch on Steam, though the game has received mostly negative reviews. Here’s why.
Despite hitting a record-breaking concurrent player count of more than 1 million on Steam, Monster Hunter Wilds is facing mostly negative reviews on the platform. Players have cited poor optimization, bugs, and performance issues as the primary reason behind their dissatisfaction with the game.
Only a few hours after its launch today on February 28, 2025, Monster Hunter Wilds reached an all-time concurrent player peak of 1,098,494, a record for the series. In comparison, Monster Hunter: World achieved an all-time peak of 334,684 players and Monster Hunter Rise achieved an all-time peak of 231,360 players. A day one release has worked wonders for the latest entry, allowing it to achieve a significantly larger player base compared to prior entries. The availability of crossplay between the PlayStation, Xbox, and PC – a first for the series – versions of the game will undoubtedly encourage a healthier community for years to come.
Unfortunately, as mentioned above, the PC version of Monster Hunter Wilds currently suffers from some major performance issues that need to be ironed out before they impact the strong momentum that the game is experiencing at the moment. At the High texture setting, the game runs with some blatantly low-resolution and buggy textures. The Highest texture setting can be selected by downloading a high resolution texture pack, but enabling it adds frame time hitches as a result of the game streaming in large chunks of assets.
Even on the High setting, a GPU with 8 GB of VRAM will run Monster Hunter Wilds with frame time stutters due to streaming. Dropping the setting down to Medium will eliminate major hitches on such GPU configurations, but the frame rate will remain unstable. Simply moving the camera around leads to noticeable drops in performance, suggesting that the game’s streaming system is likely not functioning as intended.
