Steam Passes 40 Million Concurrent Users With Strong Launch of Monster Hunter Wilds

On Sunday, Steam hit 40 million concurrent users for the first time, doubling the CCU peak in five years. Monster Hunter Wilds contributed to the new record with one of the strongest launches ever on the platform.

On 2 March 2025, for the first time, more than 40 million players were online at the same time on Steam, 40,270,997 to be exact (SteamDB) - although 'only' 12,727,475 of these users were actually active in games. Steam reached the 20 million CCU mark just under five years ago, during the Covid-19 pandemic, between February and March 2020, when there were 7.2 million concurrent users active in games. The 30 million mark was not passed until October 2022.

The launch of Monster Hunter Wilds on Friday 28 February 2025 played a part in this. Capcom's game reached a CCU peak of 1,384,608 on Saturday, the fifth highest ever on Steam, behind only PUBG: Battlegrounds (when it was not yet free-to-play), Black Myth: Wukong, Palworld and Counter-Strike 2 (free-to-play). It is well ahead of Lost Ark (free-to-play), Dota 2 (free-to-play), Cyberpunk 2077, Elden Ring, Banana (free-to-play), New World, Hogwarts Legacy and Baldur's Gate 3.

For publisher Capcom, this is by far the most successful launch of a game on Steam. The previous record holder was Monster Hunter: World with 334,684 in August 2018, so Monster Hunter Wilds is over a million CCUs ahead - this excludes the two Capcom Arcade Stadium games, which are compilations of classic arcade titles with a free downloadable game that also attracted trading card collectors. Monster Hunter Wilds and World is followed by Monster Hunter Rise (231,360 CCU), Dragon's Dogma 2 (228,585 CCU) and the remake of Resident Evil 4 (168,191 CCU). So it's already a huge success for Capcom.

However, user feedback is mixed, with 57% of the current 56,217 user reviews being 'positive'. Just over a third of reviews are written in Simplified Chinese, of which only 24% are 'positive', compared to 67% for English reviews. Aside from unnecessarily cumbersome co-op features, the technical state of the game is criticised in terms of crashes, optimisations and hardware requirements in terms of graphics quality, which Digital Foundry has clearly worked out. The situation was similar with Dragon's Dogma 2, another open-world title based on the RE engine.

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