(Image credit: SteamDB)
Update, 3:26 am PT: It’s not even been 24 hours since Monster Hunter Wilds‘ PC release—but it’s very, very nearly scraped close to 1 million players on Steam in its first six hours. As mentioned in the original story below, Capcom’s megafauna-filled mega-release shot to the top 10 rankings of the most-played PC games of all time on Steam in less than two hours.

At the time of writing, it’s still seated comfortably just under Cyberpunk 2077—fewer than 70,000 peak players below CD Projekt’s heavy-hitter. The hype is downright stratospheric for this thing. While things have tapered off just a tad—with the current player count sitting at 933,377 right now, I feel like I should note it’s not even the weekend yet. So long as things continue, punching through that 1 million ceiling is entirely possible.

Mind, these are just Steam numbers—when you take consoles into account, Wilds has almost assuredly had more than 1 million hunters donning their weapon of choice to go whack some critters.

Short of a catastrophic server meltdown, it was almost inevitable Monster Hunter Wilds would smash its way into the Steam record books. But I didn’t think it would happen this fast.

As of 10:05 pm Pacific on launch day, Wilds has snatched a spot among the most-played games on Steam, surpassing the all-time peak player records of Baldur’s Gate 3 (875,343), Hogwarts Legacy (879,308) and New World (913, 634) to take the #10 spot. As of this writing, 920,464 hunters are online beating up their first Chatacabra (or, more likely, messing around in the character creator).

Then, at around 10:20 pm, Wilds moved up to the #8 spot, passing Elden Ring’s 953,426. Cyberpunk 2077 is up next, but it’s going to take another 100,000 players to pass it. How much higher will that player count go to this weekend? We’ll be keeping tabs.