Is it me or do these surprise hits coming out of nowhere seem to more and more of a common thing in the past few years?
Maybe it's just because I'm approaching mid life and don't pay attention to everything gaming related but this, Hell Divers II and Baldur's Gate 3 taking over the gaming sphere for a bit seem to me to come of nowhere from my prospective.
Even Elden ring and Monster Hunter World exploding like they did was at one time a laughable thought. especially Monster Hunter World which people thought would be lucky to sell 2 million at most
Baldur's Gate is a notable, albeit old IP.
Larian Studios generally don't say how much their game sell, but we know that right before the launch of BG3, Divinity 1 had sold 2.5M~ and Divinity 2 had around triple that 7.5M~ But this is a very PC centric IP developer, if you're more a follower of console stuff, it's easy to not notice how popular their game actually are(especially for a CRPG developer).
-----
Monster Hunter World's eye watering copies sold is two-fold.
A return to HD consoles and finally piercing in the west.
And a PC strategy from Capcom that has paid off.
I imagine the game being quite popular in Asia has led to a lot of PC sales within the region that don't own a console.
We know from the
Capcom leak that the game is now best selling on PC from 2020 on.
Considering the love that Steam users have for discounted games, I would imagine this lead has increased over the years.
Wilds is going to release Day 1 on PC, which is also why this FY Capcom is predictng that they'll beat the record breaking last FY even though they don't have any big release besides Monster Hunter(probably in Feb or March).
Reminder that last year(FY24)Capcom had:
3M+ from RE4R(the game came out March 2024 which was FY23)
3M+ from SF6
3M~ from DD2
1.3M~ from that Battle Network Megaman Collections
This year they're going to have..
Kunitsu-Gami which posted a 500k PLAYERS milestone a few weeks into launch(note this is with Gamepass)
And MvC collection, which will probably sell in that 1M-2M~ range like Megaman.
Meaning Monster Hunter: Wilds have to sell like 10M~+ for Capcom for them to continue on their record YoY growth run they've been on for the last like 8 years or something. They're expecting huge numbers.
-----
Elden Ring is also not that much of a surprise, DS3 and Sekiro have sold like 10M each, FromSoft's fanbase and pedigree has grown slowly over the last decade. ER was just the culmination of their efforts plus some good marketing.
----
As for Helldivers 2, that's just a good gameplay loop and a the fact that the game was sold on PC instead of just being a PS exclusive. In the last like 3-4 years, co-op games on PC have been really booming and that was certainly one of the reasons why the game caught on like this during the launch window.
----
So the TL;DR as to why you might be surprised is partially related to the fact that some of these hits have been PC related affairs(not entirely of course). Unless we're talking bout Palworld/Wukong, haha.
BG3 is also one of those, I wouldn't be surprised if the 15M~ copies sold of the game have been like 12M on PC.
www.resetera.com
