Monster Hunter Wilds dominated Steam so hard this weekend that a new game from a Nintendo legend attracted a mere 5 reviews, and another dev tweeted they hadn't sold 'a single game' since Wilds released

Gemma from Monster Hunter Wilds looking at the character art from Omega 6: The Triangle Stars

(Image credit: Capcom, Takaya Imamura, Happymeal, Pleocene)

The Steam concurrent player count chart for Monster Hunter Wilds on SteamDB is comically vertical: in two hours Thursday night it shot from zero to just shy of a million players, and the rest of the weekend saw player levels wax and wane from around 600,000 to 1.3 million as hunters pulled themselves away from monster slaying to catch some sleep. It was a very good weekend for Monster Hunter, but maybe not such a great weekend for smaller games on Steam capsized by Wilds' tidal wave-sized wake.

On Friday, an indie game from longtime Nintendo artist Takaya Imamura launched on Steam to virtually zero notice. Imamura's credits at Nintendo across a 30+ year career include serving as the art director for Star Fox 64 and The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask and the chief designer of F-Zero X. Basically, he's the guy who drew Star Fox and Captain Falcon as well as the other characters from those two beloved Nintendo series. His art is the star attraction of indie adventure game Omega 6: The Triangle Stars, which landed on Steam with a 40% launch discount and has so far accrued a grand total of five user reviews.

Omega 6 doesn't exactly look like the kind of game that would've pulled in 100,000 players on a slower weekend, but you have to figure a game attached to the artist behind Star Fox could've gotten a bit more attention without a launch like Monster Hunter Wilds landing on the same day.

Japanese indie developer STP Works tweeted as much on Friday. As reported by GamesRadar+ and Automaton, the developer of the Old Coin Pusher Friends series posted that its sales flatlined just as Monster Hunter Wilds released.

モンハンが発売してからSteamで1本もゲーム売れてなくてワロタ pic.twitter.com/fncEdWKnURFebruary 28, 2025

"Not a single game has been sold on Steam since Monster Hunter was released, lol," STP Works said (via Google Translate). I think it's fair to say the post's somewhat tongue-in-cheek—the most recent Old Coin Pusher Friends game is about seven months old, so no doubt was selling in small numbers at this point. But an outsized portion of the Japanese Steam audience, especially, probably had one thing and one thing only on its mind last weekend.

On the flip side, goofy new co-op horror game REPO, which launched on Steam shortly ahead of Wilds last week, has already proven to be an early access smash hit. So clearly it is possible to survive out in the field against Capcom's monster—at least as long as your game clearly surpasses a certain threshold for shitposting-style antics.

TOPICS

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).