Capcom announced that the Monster Hunter Wilds, which released last Friday, sold more than 8 million units in just 3 days. This makes it the fastest-selling game in Capcom’s history.
For context, that figure is comparable with the lifetime sales of multiple Capcom hits. This includes Street Fighter 5 (7.7 million) and Devil May Cry 5 solid (8.9 million). This also puts Monster Hunter Wilds more than a third of the way to outperforming the company’s current bestseller, its predecessor Monster Hunter: World (21.3 million). That’s just in the game’s opening weekend.
The Capcom announcement goes on to explain how its global initiatives helped bring the new game to a wider audience. These efforts included regular online events providing development progress updates and the extended online open beta.
“Following the game’s announcement, Capcom promoted the appeal of Monster Hunter Wilds to a broad audience worldwide, exhibiting the title at global video game events and holding an online open beta test to give many players a chance to try it, while also providing updates on game information via the online events such as Monster Hunter Wilds Showcase.
“As a result of these continuous global initiatives, Monster Hunter Wilds has evoked massive excitement and achieved sales of 8 million units in 3 days, the fastest any game has done so in Capcom’s history. Capcom remains firmly committed to satisfying the expectations of all users by leveraging its industry leading game development capabilities in order to create highly entertaining gameplay experiences.”
The open beta, which ran from February 6 to February 28, allowed players to get an early look at the final game, but was marred with numerous bugs and performance issues. The beta’s prominent use of frame-generation technology also spurred heated debates online about the future direction of games development.
Many of the technical issues have carried through to the launch product. Players have taken to forums and social media to share evidence of bugs and performance problems. One game-breaking issue at launch forced the developers to release an emergency patch.
Clearly, the controversy hasn’t hurt sales. And it hasn’t negatively affected critic scores either, as Monster Hunter sits on a Metacritic score of 90. This puts it on par with World as the highest-rated game in franchise history.
