Monster Hunter Wilds is going through the wringer at the moment—and while it's addressing some issues, namely its initially thin endgame content loop, it's still clunking along through some major performance woes in PC. Woes which, at the time of writing, won't be fully addressed to the end of the year.
But the major obstacle's totally the PS5 prices, says Capcom president Haruhiro Tsujimoto in an interview with Nikkei (thanks, VGC). Here's an excerpt, brought to you with machine translation—and all the caveats about intent and tone that come with such wondrous technology.
"We also found that the 'PS5 barrier' is unexpectedly large. The console costs about 80,000 yen in Japanese yen. When you factor in the cost of software and monthly subscriptions, it comes to about 100,000 yen at the time of purchase. This is not an amount that can be easily reached, especially for younger generations. This situation is not limited to Japan, but is similar overseas as well."
He follows that shot up with the chaser: "Our next challenge is to overcome these obstacles and get Monster Hunter Wilds to as many people as possible." Hey! Tsujimoto, sir! Please I'm hopping up and down and waving my hands around: You could achieve that by fixing your game's performance, a little!
That's especially considering us PC folks made up more than 60% of sales for Capcom last year. Yes, the PS5's expensive, but most people have a mid-range PC. And as EA's inexplicably learned with Battlefield 6, if you make a solid set of minimum specs, you get a lot more games in a lot more hands.
In other words, the PC audience is large, and word-of-mouth really makes a huge impact. If I were looking for a reason why Wilds went from selling 10 million copies at launch to 477,000 in the past quarter as of July this year, I might figure it has something to do with 60% of my playerbase yelling angrily on Steam over it.
Now I'm not saying that PC performance is easy, or that Capcom just needs to wave a magic wand and make this all go away. On the other hand, this is one of the biggest RPG series in the world, and enough is enough. If you're not optimising for PC, you're gonna piss people off—just look at those aforementioned Steam reviews.
It's a real shame, because I otherwise liked Monster Hunter Wilds quite a bit. Unfortunately, I have a humble RTX 3060 and not a PS5, which Tsujimoto calls "the main platform" (ouch), so I'm not likely to reinstall it any time soon until the frames come back.
