Monster Hunter Now reaches 15 million downloads | Pocket Gamer.biz

Niantic and Capcom’s Monster Hunter Now has finally reached 15 million downloads, and to celebrate, Niantic is offering players free Hunt-a-thon Tickets in a clever advertisement of its web store – available to claim only via the external shop.

Celebratory paid items packs are also available to coincide with this “monster milestone”.

However, considering Monster Hunter Now reached five million installs in its first week and hit 10 million in 35 days, taking six months for another five million demonstrates a dramatic slowdown.

Running at a crawl

As a geolocation-based, Pokémon Go-esque Monster Hunter game designed for mobile, Now had quite the buzz around it in the buildup to release and through its launch period, becoming Niantic’s second-biggest hit almost immediately. The title generated over $30 million in its first month but as 2023 came to a close, revenue and downloads started to slow.

New monetisation tactics have been implemented since and the frequency of new monster spawns was increased in March of this year, but installs have still been trickling instead of pouring. According to App Magic estimates, only 235,000 downloads have taken place in the past month – roughly 2.5% of the download rate last September.

Despite this crawl in downloads, Now is certainly a success as one of the five biggest location-based games in Japan, its key market. It’s also outperforming Pokémon Go in its revenue per player and its retention rates, be they at D1 or D30.

In hopes of further increasing its downloads, Now recently introduced a Monster Tracker to empower players to hunt a monster of their choice, and has started giving players in-game currency in exchange for discarded materials – incentivising hunts even if they aren’t interested in a specific monster that spawns in. Group Hunt Rewards have been implemented to encourage multiplayer.

The game’s next steps are to introduce an event built around the devilish Deviljho and to release the wolf-beast Zinogre on the field for a limited time; as the most popular monster in the franchise, the Zinogre event in particular should bring about an inevitable surge in players – or at the very least give the game’s $150 million revenue another boost.