Monster Hunter’s western success looks to be continuing, with fresh news of Monster Hunter Rise: Sunbreak sales. The RPG game’s new expansion is already pulling in big numbers despite its hefty entry requirements, as Capcom announces that it has now shipped 3 million units of Monster Hunter Rise: Sunbreak globally.
Monster Hunter Rise: Sunbreak is the latest in the tradition of ‘master rank’ expansions for the multiplayer game series. It’s essentially an entire new full-sized adventure stacked on top of Monster Hunter Rise’s base game, featuring harder versions of the game’s beasties alongside a new lineup of Sunbreak monsters, and requires players to have finished the whole base campaign and levelled up their hunter a decent way just to play it.
That hasn’t stopped plenty of players from jumping in already, however. While the 3 million units number reported by Capcom is for units shipped rather than sold (meaning that it’s counting units delivered to retailers rather than what’s actually been sold through to consumers), shipping numbers are usually in pretty close correlation to demand – retailers aren’t going to order in stock that they don’t think they can move, after all.
It’s also likely that a sizeable chunk of that number will be made up of digital sales rather than units on store shelves given the DLC nature of Sunbreak, though Capcom didn’t separate out the versions. A physical edition including the base game and its expansion is available to Nintendo Switch owners.
The expansion has also seen huge numbers of players jumping into the Steam version of the game, with tracking site SteamDB listing an all-time concurrent player count peak of 231,360 over the weekend of July 3-4 following the expansion’s release. It’s continued to hold an average around the 100k player mark since then as well. The series as a whole has now shipped 85 million units worldwide as of July 13.
Given that the base game launched later on PC than its initial Nintendo Switch launch, and that it saw a notable discount during the recent Steam Summer sale, it’s possible that many players are still working their way through the base version of the game – although players who have access to Sunbreak will also be able to use some of its new features and some powerful starter equipment in the early stages of their adventure.
If you’re exploring Sunbreak, be sure to check out our Monster Hunter Rise: Sunbreak Longsword build – one of our favourite weapons, and a standout entry on our Sunbreak weapon tier list as well.