Capcom has confirmed that Monster Hunter Rise’s pending release to PlayStation and Xbox will be download only, with no physical versions planned.

We had reported on the rumor that the latest Monster Hunter would be coming to these platforms at the end of last month, as well as Capcom’s official announcement last December 2, 2022. It seems that this release had already been planned well in advance, but was probably not planned from the very start.

Monster Hunter Rise will be releasing on PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One, Xbox Series S, and Xbox Series X on January 20, 2023. Its original Nintendo Switch release dates to as far back as March 26, 2021, and then the Steam release came on January 12, 2022. This long wait was no coincidence, as Nintendo did pay for timed exclusivity to the tune of $ 6 million.

Some fans saw that Monster Hunter World outsold every other Monster Hunter game that came before it, and wondered why Capcom would even go back to Nintendo to make Monster Hunter Rise exclusive. The reason is deep in the Monster Hunter franchise’s history. While fans best remember Monster Hunter as originally being a PlayStation franchise, the games actually did not perform well in the West on either the PlayStation 2 or PlayStation 4.

The breakthrough moment for the online coop franchise came with Monster Hunter Tri on the Wii in 2009. This game became successful in the West when previous Monster Hunter games on PlayStation were duds outside Japan. While Monster Hunter Tri’s lifetime sales numbers of 1.9 million units is dwarfed by Monster Hunter World’s 18 million units, Monster Hunter World would not even be in that position if Nintendo’s platforms did not popularize the franchise outside Japan in the first place. This relationship between Nintendo and Capcom for exclusivity lasted for nearly a decade.

Monster Hunter Rise’s success on Nintendo Switch alone confirms that the franchise continues to still have a major fanbase among Nintendo fans. It’s highly likely that many of those fans also owned either a PlayStation or an Xbox, and also played games on PC. So Nintendo has an incentive to keep Monster Hunter close to them as much as possible and leverage their relationship with Capcom, even if they’re no longer paying for exclusivity.

Could this be the reason the game is digital only on these platforms? Monster Hunter Rise is only 36 GB on Steam, and both the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X have disc capacities that can carry larger games. So there are likely no real impediments to a physical release.

On the other hand, this may be a situation where the Xbox and PlayStation versions leverage both platform’s unique capabilities, especially when it comes to Xbox Series and PlayStation 5 consoles using SSD for ultra fast loading speeds. Capcom could very well reveal such features for both consoles in the near future.

Source: Gematsu via PushSquare