You shouldn't personify or feel pity for games—developers? Certainly, they're people. But the game itself is not alive, and it doesn't have feelings, and any sentimentality or nostalgia you feel for it is a mere trick of the light. Unfortunately, I am not taking my own advice, because Monster Hunter Wilds is getting so thoroughly punished that I'm starting to feel bad for the li'l guy.

It's not as though Wilds hasn't earned its licks—persistent performance issues have utterly marred the game's reception on PC, and unlike most games where this generally improves over time, Wilds has only gotten worse for the lion's share of players. That's despite the fact that the game is pretty solid otherwise.

But playability is important, and Capcom has absolutely been dragging its feet on fixing it. We'll just have to see if December's promised improvements will actually drag Wilds out of the dumpster it's spent the last few months thrashing about in.

In the meantime, though, Capcom has somewhat thrown poor, pitiful Wilds under the bus. That's via a financial report Q&A session (thanks, Eurogamer). When asked whether the upcoming Resident Evil Requiem will run just as terribly as Wilds did, Capcom tightened up its fancy tie and gave a clipped, corporate response:

"Resident Evil Requiem differs from Monster Hunter Wilds in terms of gameplay, system architecture, and network features. At present, we do not anticipate similar risks. We are developing the game to provide a smooth gaming experience across a wide range of PC specifications."

Oof. Well, that's likely a relief—especially given Requiem started out as a multiplayer game before the studio decided to take it single-player. Fingers crossed that this isn't just a company soothing its shareholders.

Mind, given how troubled Wilds has been post-launch (specifically when you're a giant like Capcom with enormous expectations out of your flagship series—over 20,000 people are still playing it as I write this, which is plenty otherwise) I'd be surprised if Capcom would invite the same turmoil twice.

Especially given it had to reassure investors that other series of the same ilk aren't suffering like poor, pitiable Wilds is: "Catalog titles released two years ago and earlier, including those in the Resident Evil series, continue to perform well. We do not have concerns about the growth potential of catalog sales." No attempt to excuse Monster Hunter Wilds, though—it's on the naughty step where it belongs.

Arc Raiders has been on an upward trend over the last few weeks since its launch. Reaching an impressive 100,000 concurrent players in just the first half an hour and then doubling that within a day, it seems like everyone's hooked on raiding.

Three weeks after its launch, Arc Raiders is still not letting up, reaching a new high over the weekend of 481,966 concurrent players on Steam. This follows a gradual but steady increase in players since launch. If you check out the Steam charts, then you'll see that only small dips appear on Mondays after a strong weekend.

But as I said before, the levels of popularity that Arc Raiders has managed to reach indicate that this wave of hype won't die out any time soon. Selling four million copies and counting, with more than 700,000 active players across PC and consoles, plus a community event that was completed in less than 40 hours, the raiding community is certainly an active one.

And players haven't shied away from pointing out just how impressive this milestone is: "Pretty crazy, hitting new peaks especially when the new COD and Tarkov 1.0 on Steam came out."

Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 and Escape from Tarkov 1.0 aren't putting up the kind of competition that you'd expect. With Black Ops 7 pulling in significantly fewer players than last year's game, and Tarkov having such an awful launch that players are review bombing it.

Battlefield 6 may be the only significant competition that Arc Raiders has. It even managed to pull me away from killing Arcs over the weekend, but even EA's golden child hasn't kept as impressive a tail. Sure, it has a significantly higher peak of 747,440 players, but over the first three weeks of its launch, it saw players steadily decline, and has seen a similar trend since then.

There's no telling how long Arc Raiders will keep up this growth, even if everything looks good now. Live service games can have a rocky lifespan, so it's probably just better to appreciate the good times when you know you're in them.