Path of Exile 2 developer Grinding Gear Games has warned of potential log-in queues when the free-to-play game enters early access this weekend due to the overwhelming amount of players expected to flood its servers.
“We’ve just passed 1 million redemptions for Path of Exile 2 keys, and sales are still increasing,” director Jonathan Rogers said in a recent video, embedded below. “Obviously this great news, but it also comes with some downsides too. There are probably going to be some queues during the launch weekend.”
The studio never thought demand for Path of Exile 2 would get so big, he added. While more cloud capacity is being added to the existing servers, Grinding Gear still has some concerns about the challenging road ahead.
“We quite frankly don’t know what our backend services are going to be able to handle as we go above a million users,” Rogers said. “We’ve added more database shards, scaling everything we have up as far as it’ll go, but we’re really not sure what kind of limits we might hit. We never expected things to go this big during early access.”
Path of Exile 2 is the long-awaited sequel to a 2013 hack-and-slash, action role-playing game considered a spiritual successor to the Diablo series. After previewing Path of Exile 2 at ExileCon 2023, Polygon guides producer Ryan Gilliam described it as a “much prettier” game than its predecessor that rewards “precision and expertise” with a new dodge roll mechanic. Jordan Oloman, reporting for Polygon from Gamescom 2024, praised Path of Exile 2’s use of WASD-style movement over the point-and-click controls common to the genre.
“Thank you guys for believing so much in this project,” Rogers said, wrapping up his video message. “If we do run into server issues at launch, just know that we’re going to be working as hard as we can to solve them.”
Update (4:45 p.m. ET): Following the game’s launch at 2 p.m. ET on Friday, Path of Exile 2 players have described both significant wait times and crashes on social media. The development team has a running thread on X about the game’s status; troubleshooting has required the team to “restart the realm” multiple times since its launch.
