The online RPG Monster Hunter World was the unexpected winner on Steam in February 2020. With the expansion Iceborne, the PC boom began in January 2020. The astonishing thing: The hype continues, even though the expansion is already 6 weeks old and the reviews are quite poor.
How strong is Monster Hunter World currently on Steam? The monster killer currently sits at a strong 6th place with 91,500 players. It ranks ahead of titles like Destiny 2.
In recent days, the game has consistently achieved peak player counts between 150,000 and 160,000 players.
Iceborne has brought back about 2 out of 3 players on Steam: January 2020 was the most successful month since the Steam release in August 2018.
Expansion is already 6 weeks old, yet MHW still rocks
The astonishing thing is: Monster Hunter World was not designed as a “games as a service” title. Therefore, it is unusual that the action RPG is experiencing such a stable resurgence on Steam.
Especially since the expansion “Iceborne” was released on September 6, 2019, for PS4 and Xbox One and did not make big waves. While the expansion was frequently purchased, the big media hype was absent.
For PC, the expansion only came out on January 9, 2020.
Many problems, much criticism – but players still hunt
Iceborne launched on PC with significant initial difficulties: There were technical problems with bad FPS. Some even feared they had lost their entire progress from the base game, as their save data and hunters had vanished with Iceborne.
Yet despite all the criticism, it’s now clear that Monster Hunter World continues to engage players on Steam even one and a half months after the release of Iceborne: a strong performance of the game. In contrast, Destiny 2 saw its player numbers drop immediately after the Steam launch .
Regular new updates surely help: On February 6, the first update for Iceborne arrived and brought the popular monster Rajang. On PS4 and Xbox One, further patches have been released that will make their way to PC.
Reviews still poor – players want Denuvo gone
What do the Steam reviews say? They are quite bad for such a successful title:
- Monster Hunter World: Iceborne is at 44% positive on PC
- In the last 30 days, it was 46%, so hardly any better
Players love the expansion, but criticize the technical issues it brings with Iceborne. There are mentions of delays and problems with the copy protection Denuvo. There are connectivity issues and frustration.
One player states: The anti-cheat tool has ruined the game, even though Monster Hunter World is a cooperative game and not a competitive one. So: If someone wants to cheat, they are ultimately only cheating themselves. Moreover, cheaters would have found a way to bypass the protection in less than a week anyway.
Although Capcom has released several patches for Monster Hunter World in recent weeks, negative and positive reviews continue to balance each other out.
From the very beginning, this was a problem for Monster Hunter World on PC:
- The game itself is well received by PC players and receives a lot of praise for its features and gameplay
- However, the technical implementation has been criticized from the beginning, that was already the case in 2018 – and was even worse at the Steam release of Iceborne in 2020
