Last night, Capcom opened the gates to the Monster Hunter Wilds beta on Steam, letting PC players get a preview of the next installment in giant lizard slaying. There was no shortage of eager hunters waiting for their chance: According to SteamDB, just an hour after unlocking on PC, the Wilds beta already had over 460,000 concurrent players.
As a point of comparison, SteamDB says that Monster Hunter: World's all-time peak user count was around 334,000 shortly after its PC release in 2018. Monster Hunter: Rise, meanwhile, only capped out at 231,000 players during the launch of the Sunbreak expansion. Comparing the player counts of a free beta test with those of full, paid game releases is, I'll admit, only so useful, but there's clearly a lot of interest in Wilds. Half a million players don't show up on accident.
