The game of the year race just kicked into high gear, as Capcom has announced Monster Hunter Wilds surpassed the 8 million sales mark. It took only three days to hit that milestone, a record for the company that has brought us hits including Resident Evil, Street Fighter, and Mega Man.
Capcom's stock is on the rise due to the runaway success, gaining 13 percent value so far in 2025. It conquered the Steam charts on release, jumping to over 1 million players hours after release, Japanese indie developer STP Works tweeted it hadn't sold a single game since Wilds dropped. Something tells me they're not alone in this problem.
The Monster Hunter series has been hugely popular in Japan for years, but was a niche title everywhere else. That changed in 2018 with the release of Monster Hunter World. There were a number of factors leading to this. While many of the previous games were built for portable devices, World was always designed to launch on home consoles with the resulting graphical and gameplay upgrades.
World's different weapons offered many ways to tackle the monsters, each weapon offering a different style of combat. The influence of games such as Destiny and Dark Souls is obvious. After all, monster hunts are essentially MMO-style raids. Groups of players get their best armor, best weapons ,and coordinate to take the game's biggest challenges. They're rewarded high-level loot and armor afterwards. You get to wear parts of the monster you battled like a WWE title belt.
Souls games prepared a Western gaming audience for the "hold up, Bucko, you're not as strong as you think you are" style of combat. In many games, carrying a sword built from the scales of a dragon wouldn't fundamentally change the way you fight. In Monster Hunter, carrying a giant sword is a completely different experience from a normal blade and the player has to learn to adjust. Even after doing so, you may find out another weapon was a better fit for this battle anyway.
Wilds, like World before it, combines all these influences into a package that gamers are devouring like hungry monsters.