Looking at the past sale of Monster Hunter game, its clear where exactly the popularity of the series has been, just as Monster Hunter had been a key instrument for the PSP revival, so too did the success of the series stem from Sony’s handheld console.

		Monster Hunter Freedom Unite		Unknown	17,856	N/A	3.05m	20th Jan 09
2		Monster Hunter Freedom 2		Capcom	9,147	N/A	2.37m	20th Jan 09
3		Monster Hunter Freedom		Capcom	3,447	N/A	1.41m	10th Mar 08
4		Monster Hunter 2		Unknown	1,715	N/A	0.63m	05th Apr 08
5		Monster Hunter		Capcom	1,224	N/A	0.28m	20th Jan 09
6		Monster Hunter G		Capcom	738	N/A	0.23m	17th Feb 09

Monster Hunter is now a much bigger franchise than when it was last released on a home console, but one of the biggest factors to its success is the portability of the PSP and the ability to play ad-hoc with other people locally.

I’m pretty sure that the game will be successfully, but a lot of people on this board and indeed most forums seem to have the firm believe that the Wii version will rival the sale of a Final Fantasy or Dragon Quest.

Where does this conviction come from?

I seriously can’t see the precedent here; a million? Two millions? More? How much do people actually expect this game to sell?

This isn't meant to be an attack of the game or the Wii, I’d honestly love for someone to explain to me where the mega-high expectation of sale is coming from, because I’m positive I’m missing something.

1.2m Japan
1.5m worldwide

I would say this mabye 1.7 for WW but somewhere around these numbers..

900k Japan
1.3m Worldwide (400k US + EU)

if capcom go ahead with pay for play online, then I have no idea how well/bad this will do....seeing as all their monster hunter games have had just loca only.

 QFT

anything under 400k in Japan is a disaster as it's lower than the previous MH on consoles. However the bar has been raised since the popularity has grown, i'd think anything over 800k would be good and 1 million would be successful. I'm just talking about Japanese sales. I'm a little worried that pay to play may hurt the games sales though, but it would also mean it wouldn't need to sell as much to be financially successful.

Wait its going to feature pay-to-play? And people are still expecting massive success?

1 million woldwide.

the more i think about it the more i am worried about pay to play, we're talking monthly fee right? Monster Hunter's popularity started because you could play with your friend on a handheld easily. Pay to play online doesn't have a huge record of being a success in Japan. At the same time MH3 has strong production values that give it merits on its own. We'll have a pretty good idea when monster hunter g comes out.