Monster Hunter: World continues to fly off the shelves as anticipation for Wilds reaches critical mass

Monster Hunter Wilds is only two weeks away, but that hasn’t stopped its predecessor from continuing to sell like hotcakes, shifting a whole bunch of copies even seven years after its initial release.

Yep, Monster Hunter World continues to make bank for Capcom, it seems, as Automaton Media (via IGN Japan) reports that it managed to sell over one million copies between October and December last year. It went up from a reported 27 million copies sold in September, to 28.1 million in Capcom’s latest financial results call. Sales of expansion Iceborne weren’t far behind, with around an extra 900,000 units shifted in the final quarter of 2024.

I reckon that was definitely helped by Capcom pushing some tidy discounts of the game throughout November and December, bringing the base game down to just over £8 or just under $10. But I also reckon, more broadly, that it’s down to the astronomical levels of hype around Wilds that, even as a veteran Monster Hunter fan, I could’ve never anticipated.

After all, it was the most popular booth at Gamescom by far last August, with 10-hour queues to play taking up a ridiculous amount of space on the showroom floor, disrupting other booths on the first day before Capcom finally had to bring the hammer down and bring the queues to a (still eye-watering) four-hour wait, turning would-be hunters away when the line got too long. It’s also currently the most wishlisted game on Steam, beating out some huge-hitters like Hollow Knight: Silksong and Elden Ring Nightrein.

Those last three months also happen to coincide with the first open beta for Monster Hunter Wilds—a chance to play the game that didn’t require flights to Germany and slowly shuffling through a queue for half the day. While it was a great chance to play, it was also a nightmare performance for a lot of PC players thanks to some poor optimisations, which also has me wondering if that drove newer players over to World to get a better look of what Monster Hunter is all about.

Now I’m mostly talking about World here, since it’s closer to Wilds in its whole shtick, but the more recent Monster Hunter Rise hasn’t been performing too badly, either. It sold around 700,000 copies in the same three months, which isn’t bad going at all if you ask me.

It’s actually really cool to see the Monster Hunter hype train chugging full steam ahead right now. More folk trying one of the coolest action game series out there is never a bad thing, and I hope enough of those new buyers liked World to make the jump over to Wilds later this month. Even if they didn’t, I don’t think Capcom is fretting too much. Producer Ryozo Tsujimoto said he’s “very confident” that the game is going to do well. Judging by all of the above, I believe it.