Capcom has stated that they ""found that the 'PS5 barrier' is unexpectedly large" and blame that console's price for hurting the game's sales:

https://www.vgchartz.com/article/465644/capcom-president-ps5-price-is-an-unexpectedly-large-barrier-for-monster-hunter-wild-sales/

"The console costs about 80,000 yen ($540 USD)," said Tsujimoto. "When you factor in the cost of software and monthly subscriptions, it comes to about 100,000 yen ($675 USD) 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."

PS5 price might be a barrier in Japan. But worldwide, a large part of Playstation's Japanese game fans switched to PC long before price hikes (I think this was corroborated by someone at Sega). In MH Wilds's case, the game is just a disappointment overall and a technical disaster on PC in particular. Capcom fucked up.

If they went the World/Rise way with timed exclusivity, it may have helped them optimize the game on every system its on. Timed-exclusivty and delays aren't inherently bad decisions.

lol, Capcom's president also saying Switch 2 sold above their expectations.

Still think this is gonna end up on Switch 2, even if they have to rebuild a lot of the code from the ground up. The legs of the game are nowhere near what they expected, a successful run on Switch 2 could easily add 3-4+ million in extra sales to this game's faltering legs and those optimizations can then also be applied to the console and PC versions for better performance.

While I can see the price argument making sense in Japan, globally I think it's more that the game itself just wasn't up to expectations, especially on PC where it runs so poorly that a lot of people were locked out of playing it due to not having the gear to brute force it.

In retrospect, they probably would have been better off making a smaller scale game more like Rise/World that could run more comfortably on lower spec PCs while also looking better on PS5/Xbox and being able to be brought across to Switch 2.

How could they not see NS2 being a success? One would think with a company Capcoms size they would have someone (or a small team) dedicated to studying the market/advertising. Everyone knew the NS2 was going to sell, you dont clear 150 million systems, have a super hyped upcoming launch and not be expected to clear some massive numbers.

Well, even with the development kit they only ported Street Fighter 6 and Kunitsu-Gami (they announced Monster Hunter Stories 3 too), so maybe Capcom was reluctant about the Switch 2 sucess?

Which is a damn shame because PC was where the majority of sales of Wilds were, and if they had put out a technically competent game, who knows how high the game could've gone. Not even just on PC, but across the board.

A lot of old fart Japanese executives are still living in 2011 thinking that Nintendo will screw up every successor console. Capcom's stock price suffered a terrible 10% drop in one day after news of Wild's awful post launch sales came to light. They are probably scrambling now to get a version that will work on Switch 2 and improved performance on PC in particular. 

I think they thought Switch 2 would be to Switch 1 what 3DS was to DS ... not a flop per se, but not a massive success it has been. Now they're surprised it's selling so well while crying about the PS5 being too expensive and limiting MH Wild sales, lol. 

Yeah shooting for a huge ambitious game that ultimately ended up crumbling under the weight of its own scope was a particularly silly move when it results in a huge portion of your base not being able to play the game in a decent state.

The game recommends an RTX 4060 just to hit 1080p/60fps with frame gen at medium settings, yet visually it looks worse than World, a 2018 PS4 game. Just a mess all around.

Capcom have been really weird for a while now when it comes to Nintendo; despite the Switch 1 being one of the highest selling consoles of all time, they gave it minimal support outside of MH Rise, then left Switch 2 entirely out of their plans for Wilds despite Rise selling likely over 10 million on Switch.

Perhaps but I dunno how much timed exclusivity would've helped here since it's been out for half a year and still seems to be a technical mess. The game in general just seems to be badly made in terms of how it runs so it might be quite a while till performance gets to an acceptable state.

The Switch 2 had an absolutely record shattering launch so of course it has sold above their expectations. There's a big difference between expecting success and expecting that. My guess is they thought it would get off to a strong start, just not this insane of a start.