A decade ago, it was hard to conceive of the Monster Hunter series ever becoming as popular in the west as it had become in Japan. Now with the release of Monster Hunter Wilds last week, the series is far exceeding its sales at its zenith, with Capcom citing 8 million copies sold in its first three days. This makes Wilds the fastest-selling RE engine game, a milestone in the short history of Capcom’s proprietary game engine.
Short for the “Reach for the Moon” engine and not, as is popularly believed, the “Resident Evil” engine, the RE Engine has been powering Capcom’s projects throughout this generation. The first game on the RE Engine, 2017’s Resident Evil 7: Biohazard, is currently the best-selling title running on it, but Monster Hunter Wilds is likely to give it a run for its money. In the intervening years, the RE engine has gotten a fair amount of tweaking and has become the basis for everything from multiplayer shooters like Exoprimal to 2D platformers like Ghosts ‘n Goblins Resurrection to fighting games like Street Fighter 6.
The reason this is of such technological note is that, by using their own internal engine, Capcom is saving quite a bit of money the engine licensing costs. As a hypothetical, had Monster Hunter Wilds instead employed the Unreal Engine, a 5% royalty would kick in after gross revenue from the product exceeds $1 million USD, which Wilds blew past in less than a few days. Essentially, Capcom would have been forking over 5% of their gross revenue to Epic for Monster Hunter Wilds, which they are instead just keeping for themselves.
There are also downsides to this approach, which Electronic Arts also discovered when it forced use of the proprietary Frostbite engine across all of its projects. The RE engine, while limber, does not necessarily suit all games without heavy tweaking. Last year’s Dragon’s Dogma 2 and even Monster Hunter Wilds, both open-world games, suffer poor performance that has been notable in their launch criticism. On the other hand, this criticism has yet to affect their bottom line, as Dragon’s Dogma 2 was the 12th best selling game of 2024 in the U.S. and Wilds, as discussed, is smashing sales records. But just because it has not made a difference yet does not mean it never will. A single proprietary engine meant to fit all types of games needs to be constantly coddled and adjusted, which is a lot of ongoing work as needs change.
Only time will tell how Capcom’s strategy will continue to work, but so far, the numbers cannot be argued with. The choice to go with a versatile proprietary engine has paid off in spades for them and can serve as an observable lessons for other developers and engineers in the industry.
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