Thousands converged on Shibuya on Saturday and Sunday to hunt for monsters in an augmented reality game reminiscent of Pokemon Go.
It had them ambling and sometimes running everywhere from Meiji Park to near Yoyogi National Stadium as the Monster Hunter Now app guided them toward virtual prey: creatures large and small displayed on mobile devices in real-world locations.
After doing battle, players were rewarded with items to craft weapons or armor.
The spike-covered Nergigante, metallic Gold Rathian and Silver Rathalos debuted at the event.
For the 20,000 participating in the first in-person live event for Monster Hunter Now, it was a chance to capture some of the magic of 2016, when Pokemon Go swept the globe in a mania so intense infrastructure in some places was overwhelmed by participants searching for the more kid-friendly monsters of the Pokemon universe.
For Niantic, which developed Pokemon Go in partnership with Nintendo, the Saturday event was an opportunity to see whether its Monster Hunter Now would also be a sensation.
The San Francisco-based Google spinoff has so far been unable to repeat the earlier success. Harry Potter and NBA games developed by the company were scrapped soon after they flopped. Games based on Marvel and Transformers intellectual property were canceled before they even hit the market.
Monster Hunter Now was developed in collaboration with Capcom, the Osaka-based company behind the Monster Hunter video game series. Tokyo Stock Exchange-listed Capcom has tried a number of times to bring Monster Hunter to smartphones, and none of its efforts ever caught on.
Early indications suggest that Monster Hunter Now will not be another hit on the scale of Pokemon Go.
“Monster Hunter Now is what I would call a modest success,” says mobile gaming expert and Kantan Games CEO Serkan Toto. “It is widely regarded to be a good game. It is cleverly mixing the Monster Hunter and GPS gameplay, but it certainly did not set the world on fire like Pokemon Go did.”
For the quarter ended June 30, Capcom reported more than 15 million Monster Hunter Now downloads in total since the game was made available in September 2023. Pokemon Go achieved more than 500 million downloads in the two months after its release.
Sensor Tower, which tracks mobile app revenue, ranked Monster Hunter Now as the 42nd top-grossing game in Japan in the final week of September. Dragon Quest Walk, another location-based title from Square Enix that's also based on a video game series, was No. 2.
“It must be said that Monster Hunter Now has not become a hit in other territories,” says Toto, who notes that Japan is the No. 1 country for location-based gaming globally. “Japan is the app's strongest market.”
“Things look bleak in the rest of the world,” he added.
Players paid ¥3,000 to attend the event on Saturday, which was promoted as a Shibuya “carnival.”
They were granted access to exclusive location-based tasks and the chance to be the first to hunt new types of monsters. Themed areas were set up in places such as Meiji Jingu Gaien and the new Shibuya Sakura Stage complex, where players could meet and exchange in-game IDs.
Because of the social and geographical nature of Niantic’s games, they rely on a critical mass of users in order to take off. The company has added some features to Monster Hunter Now to make it easier to play in regions where it isn’t so popular, such as cooperative hunts that can be joined regardless of location.
An online-only version of the Shibuya event, featuring much of the same content, will take place on the weekend of Nov. 2.
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