Final results:

Don't forget to praise me and @vidyaguy for the sublime prediction skills.

I feel like it would have done 1-2m more on Steam alone if it weren't for the atrocious state of the game and the terrible optimisation.

People predicting less than 5m sales when itaunches on Steam though... 😅

Wow. 

Yeah I can't say I understand voting 6 million sales tops, which over 57% of voters did here. It ain't as bad as Monster Hunter World's early polls mind you, but at least that had the excuse of Monster Hunter being a small IP prior to World's launch.

Pretty crazy that MH Wilds can't have a bigger launch on 3 big platforms day 1 than what TOTK had on just the Switch. Is the PC market smaller than most people think? If Steam was much bigger than Switch in terms of user base, how can big Switch only games have a bigger launch than big PC launches (Plus Xbox and PS)?

Fantastic debut for Wilds. The only negative thing is that with sales like this, there is less incentive for Capcom to port the game to Switch 2. Very curious to see the resulting Famitsu sales for this week.

I think when it comes to Capcom, thinking that they will have Switch 2 be part of their development pipeline for their new games won't happen. For them the Switch 2 will be a PS4 machine, where they just port old games.

Steam has about 40 million active users. Also, why is platform totals your only measuring stick here for software sales, without considering the IPs themselves? It's like saying "How come Splatoon 3 had a smaller opening than Spiderman 2 when the Switch userbase is so much bigger than the PS5?"

EDIT: Actually the 40 million number is max concurrent users so that is not the appropriate metric. Second part of the post still stands.

TotK was front-loaded for a Nintendo game, Wilds is probably going to outsell it even though Zelda post-BotW is a massive IP, arguably bigger than even 2D and 3D Mario. Not that many 3rd party IP's are more popular. Nintendo is just on another level when you factor in that their games are exclusive to one platform.

No one is overestimating Steam. The software competition on Steam is much greater than Switch, which a lot of if not most people buy primarily for Nintendo games, as opposed to Steam and Playstation playerbases being spread out across a greater range of games including F2P, MMO's, and live service titles. Monster Hunter's growth is more impressive than Zelda and pretty much any modern series that isn't GTA. But it's apples and oranges. Capcom produces more big MH games per decade than Nintendo does 3D Zeldas. From 2018 to 2025, Capcom made World, Iceborne, Rise, Sunbreak, and now Wilds. Zelda and Monster Hunter follow two very different models that aren't really comparable.

Wilds had an excellent opening for a Monster Hunter game and that's all that matters at the moment.

On sales I doubt that as front loaded or not Nintendo's titles have shown massive legs and with TOTK is at 21m and counting it's a big task especially with the fact that the won't be a new mainline Zelda for a while and that Switch 2 will have BC BOTW after all is still selling at 33m, also the competition argument is outdated here as Switch has one of the best libraries of any platform ever released buying primarily for first party titles doesn't equate to people not buying other titles truth is TOTK sold because it's in the same boat as games like GTA. On Growth I disagree Zelda averaged 4m before BOTW with the only exceptions being the original, OOT and TP, this is the same sales average as MH pre-World to pass one off as more impressive is a bit much as the growth is almost identical.

@Sephiran 

PC isn't smaller than people think Wilds did better than World I'd speculate PC has likely grown significantly for MH with PC players from World returning as well as the likelihood that some Xbox players have migrated over.