Grinding Gear Games apparently didn’t expect action role-playing game Path of Exile 2 to do as well as it did when it launched in early access late last year.
The New Zealand-based company suspected that the £25 entrance fee, there temporarily while the game is in open development in early access (it will eventually be a free to play game), would put people off. But it didn’t. At its peak, Path of Exile 2 had between 800,000 and 900,000 concurrent players. It was, I’m told, the company’s biggest ever release.
“It was absolutely 100 percent a success,” company co-founder and game director Jonathan Rogers told me in an interview. “As we started to get closer to release and see pre-sales and stuff like that, suddenly it was like oh crap, this is looking like it might be one of our biggest releases ever, and then it did indeed turn out to be. And that is indeed our largest release by quite a lot that we’ve ever done.”
But intense popularity can change things. What was once intended as a way for dedicated fans to help shape a project ended up feeling more like a full-scale release, which meant development priorities had to change. “And you saw that early on where we started doing a bunch of changes, like nerfing stuff that needed to be nerfed,” Rogers said.
“We immediately ran into the situation we would normally expect in the full released game, which is a bunch of players are like, ‘oh you’re breaking my build’, so we had to realise, okay, we have to treat this like it’s a released game in this regard and be a bit more careful,” he said. Less experimenting, more treating it like a live service operation.
“Whenever you’ve got players, it derails what your plans are,” Rogers added, “and it has to. It’s good that it does because it forces you immediately to be responding to what the game needs, which now becomes very obvious because you’ve got actual players playing it.” Devs don’t have the time to test some things as intensely as players, collectively, do. That’s why we’re seeing a big push to expand areas like the endgame now, for example.
“I would be incredibly disappointed if we weren’t cracking a million [concurrent players] for the full release.”
The other side of intense popularity is unexpected stories related to your game such as the headline-grabbing revelation that Elon Musk paid someone to boost his Path of Exile 2 account – play his character for him – for some reason. Presumably bragging rights.
This appears to be against the game’s Terms of Service – players can’t make money by performing services in the game, as a booster would – but Musk doesn’t seem to have been reprimanded. So I asked Rogers what the procedure was for dealing with suspected cases of boosting such as this. “I don’t really want to comment about that whole drama, to be honest,” he said.
To which I asked him what he thought more broadly of Path of Exile 2 being in the news in this way. “I don’t know. It was kind of weird,” he said. “But it is what it is.”
Since release, the concurrent player numbers for Path of Exile 2 have significantly dropped off; a quick glance at Steam’s Most Played chart shows a high point of around 25,000 players today. But this doesn’t worry Rogers.
“No, no, not at all. Not at all,” he said. “Because the thing is, ultimately, the way we’ve always developed our game is that it’s seasonal. The way people play our game is that they come, they play for a month, they enjoy what they do, they leave, then they come back after the season ends.”
There’s a pattern to it, Rogers has come to realise. Player numbers dip after your initial release, dipping at around update 0.2, which is what we’re getting next week, and then from 0.3 onwards they start to rise again. “This is what happens with action-RPGs,” he said. That’s what happened with every market GGG launched Path of Exile 1 in.
He’s confident, then, Path of Exile 2 can go even bigger than early access when it launches in full, potentially this year – and if not this year then shortly after, in early 2026. “100 percent it will be [bigger],” he said. “And the reason for that is because, for that one, you’ve got the fact that it’s going free, and there are a lot of people, of course, who will try a game once it’s free, and then they’ll discover they enjoy it. I have no doubt it will be bigger.
“Look,” he added, “I would be incredibly disappointed if we weren’t cracking a million [concurrent players] for the full release, and honestly, I think we can do better than that.”
Path of Exile 2 launched in early access in December last year, and I reviewed it, and loved it. It’s an action-RPG that considerably ups the risk, making for a more frugal and perilous campaign than in genre-relative, Diablo 4. “Soulslike thrills combine with sky-high production values to make Path of Exile 2 a hugely impressive package, even in early access,” I wrote in my Path of Exile 2 early access review.
Update 0.2, which is dubbed Dawn of the Hunt and due next week (4th April), brings a significant amount of new content to the game, including a considerable rework of the endgame, a brand new Huntress class to play as, scores of new items, monsters, and encounters, new ascendency class options, and more. Grinding Gear Games showcased Path of Exile 2 patch 0.2 in detail on Twitch.