Path of Exile 2 today released in Early Access on Steam and consoles, and, despite the game’s $29.99 Early Access pricing, it has already managed to amass a peak player count of over 458,920 players on Steam alone. While this is undoubtedly good news for the developer and publisher, the increased server load has apparently already caused problems, resulting in excessive queue times to get into game sessions. At the time of writing, the game has only been available to play for a little over four hours, and the player count is only beginning to plateau now.
According to the Path of Exile X account, the development team has been hard at work trying to stem the bleeding, as it were. So far, the Path of Exile website has been down several times due to the high traffic, preventing players from claiming their Steam keys. Additionally, and somewhat hilariously, this outage has also affected the “Early Access Live Updates” site that was meant to be a resource for gamers to keep track of work the live service team was doing to try and deal with the high launch-day volumes.
While Path of Exile 2 launched to Early Access as a paid game, the developer plans to release the full version of the ARPG as a free-to-play game, like its predecessor. The original Path of Exile launched in 2012, and it has been moderately successful in it 11-year run. That said, Path of Exile 2 has managed to garner nearly twice as many concurrent players on PC in its first 24 hours than the first game in the series could in over a decade.
It’s unclear when the developer, Grinding Gear Games, will be able to get Path of Exile 2’s player volumes under control, but you can follow along on the game’s X account.
Sources: Path of Exile on X, SteamDB
