Path of Exile 2 developer Grinding Gear Games has warned potential login queues when the free-to-play game enters early access this weekend due to the overwhelming number of players expected to flood its servers.
“We just passed a million opportunities for use Path of Exile 2 keys and sales continue to grow,” said director Jonathan Rogers in a recent video embedded below. “Of course it’s great news, but it also has some drawbacks. There will likely be some lines forming on opening weekend.”
The studio never thought about demand Path of Exile 2 it will be so huge, he added. Even though more cloud capacity is being added to existing servers, Grinding Gear still has some concerns about the challenges ahead.
“Honestly, we don’t know what our backend services will be able to handle once the number of users hits one million,” Rogers said. “We’ve added more pieces of the database, scaling everything we have as far as we can, but we’re not really sure what limits we can reach. We never expected things to turn out this way during Early Access.”
Path of Exile 2 is the long-awaited sequel to the 2013 hack-and-slash action RPG considered the spiritual successor to the Diablo series. After preview Path of Exile 2 at ExileCon 2023, Polygon guide producer Ryan Gilliam described it as a “much nicer” game than its predecessor, rewarding “precision and knowledge” with a novel dodge mechanic. Jordan Oloman, a Polygon reporter from Gamescom 2024, boasted Path of Exile 2using WASD-style movement instead of the point-and-click controls typical of the genre.
“Thank you for believing so much in this project,” Rogers said, concluding his video message. “If we encounter server issues at launch, please know that we will work as hard as possible to resolve them.”
Update (4:45 p.m. ET): After the game launches on Friday at 2:00 p.m. EST, Path of Exile 2 players have described both significant wait times and crashes on social media. The development team has running thread on X about game status; troubleshooting required the team to “reboot the domain” multiple times since it went live.
