Monster Hunter: World smashes the record for biggest Japanese launch on Steam ever

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It's the biggest launch for a new game on Steam this year, by far—and one of the biggest ever.

Monster Hunter: World is off to a roaring start on PC. Just hours after the game unlocked on Steam, it's crushed the record for the biggest launch of a Japanese game in Steam's history, which Dark Souls 3 set with 129,831 concurrent players in March 2016. Monster Hunter has nearly doubled that, with a peak of 239,779 players today according to Steamcharts, an amazing number for a game that launched on consoles seven months ago. 

Prior to MHW, the biggest day-one numbers for a new game this year came from Kingdom Come: Deliverance, which pulled in nearly 96,000 players. For comparison's sake, Final Fantasy 15, another big Japanese RPG, had a peak of only 29,729 Steam players on release.

And once upon a time, no one thought Monster Hunter: World would be big outside Japan.

Wes Fenlon
Wes Fenlon
Senior Editor

Wes has been covering games and hardware for more than 10 years, first at tech sites like The Wirecutter and Tested before joining the PC Gamer team in 2014. Wes plays a little bit of everything, but he'll always jump at the chance to cover emulation and Japanese games.


When he's not obsessively optimizing and re-optimizing a tangle of conveyor belts in Satisfactory (it's really becoming a problem), he's probably playing a 20-year-old Final Fantasy or some opaque ASCII roguelike. With a focus on writing and editing features, he seeks out personal stories and in-depth histories from the corners of PC gaming and its niche communities. 50% pizza by volume (deep dish, to be specific).