'We Never Expected Things to Go This Big During Early Access' — Path of Exile 2 Dev Braces Itself for Over 1 Million Concurrent Players

The developer of Path of Exile 2 has warned players to brace themselves for server queues this weekend, with over one million concurrent players expected to hit the Early Access launch.

In a video message, Grinding Gear Games co-founder Jonathan Rogers spoke about anticipation for the action role-playing sequel surpassing the studio's expectations, and expressed concern that its backend services could buckle under the weight of the Early Access release.

Path of Exile 2’s global release times set the launch for 11am PT today, December 6, and it’s at this point that the floodgates will open. Path of Exile 2 is already the top-selling game on Steam by revenue, suggesting Rogers’ concern is well-placed. Whether the game is up to the task of coping with what’s coming, however, remains to be seen, with sales still increasing, Rogers said.

“We’ve just reached one million Early Access redemptions,” Rogers revealed in the video message. “The support you have all shown for Path of Exile 2 Early Access is far beyond anything we could have ever predicted. However we want to be upfront with you all and let you know there may very well be queues over the weekend.

“There are probably going to be some queues during the launch weekend. Before our announcement, when we were ordering capacity, we really didn’t expect to have more than a million people online at the same time.

“We’ve already ordered way more cloud capacity, and those servers will be coming online very soon, but I do have some concerns about issues with the backend. We quite frankly don’t know what our backend services are going to be able to handle as we go above a million users.

“We’ve added more database shards, scaling everything we have up as far as it will go. But we’re really not sure what kind of limits we might hit. We never expected things to go this big during EA [Early Access].

“So I just wanted to say thank you. Thank you guys so much for believing in this project. 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.”

Path of Exile 2 is GGG’s hotly anticipated free-to-play action role-playing sequel set years after the original game. Players return to the world of Wraeclast and seek to end a spreading corruption, with six character classes, each with two Ascendancy Classes, available to play at the launch of Early Access later this week. There’s co-op for up to six players, but you can play solo. Check out IGN’s Path of Exile 2 preview, where we gave the Mercenary class a whirl and got a first look at the endgame, for more.

Wesley is the UK News Editor for IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at [email protected] or confidentially at [email protected].