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Grinding Gear Games had previously cautioned us about the potential rocky launch of Path of Exile 2 during its early access. The developer had anticipated a player count of no more than a million, yet the pre-sales of this action RPG exceeded that expectation. Game director Jonathan Rogers stated, "There are likely to be some queues during the launch weekend. When ordering [server] capacity before the launch, we truly didn't expect to have more than a million people online simultaneously."

Early Access Launch Surge

Indeed, within just 30 minutes of Path of Exile 2 going live on Steam, the concurrent player count skyrocketed to over 286,000. However, everyone found themselves stuck staring at the login screen as Grinding Gear Games worked on backend updates. The developer had mentioned on X just prior to the launch that it was "doing some last minute database upgrades to handle the overwhelming number of Exiles getting ready to LOGIN to Path of Exile 2." It also warned of a "short delay" in servers coming online, and this seems to be the case.The original Path of Exile is a highly popular game. Those of us who had the opportunity to play the sequel early were highly impressed. We anticipate that not only existing PoE players will flock to it, but also a crowd of new and old ARPG players who have been engaged with Diablo 4 in the past couple of years. It has even drawn comparisons to FromSoftware games, which could potentially expand its reach further. As Fraser wrote, "I hate the cliche, but Path of Exile 2 really is the Dark Souls of isometric dungeon crawlers."There is no doubt about the level of interest. Currently, more than one million people are watching Path of Exile 2 streams on Twitch. Grinding Gear Games stated in its latest update on X that it has now deployed the new database configuration and estimates that access will be available within the next half-hour. We will continue to monitor the situation and keep you informed when things start to improve.