As over a million fans turn up for Path of Exile 2’s Early Access, devs warn of queues because that’s more than anything they “could have ever predicted”

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Grinding Gear Games is already planning to expand its server capabilities

Path of Exile 2
(Image credit: Grinding Gear Games)

Path of Exile 2 is way more popular than developer Grinding Gear Games ever anticipated, so the studio is warning folks about the potentially long queues that might be lining up over its early access launch weekend.

The original Diablo challenger managed to draw in hundreds of thousands of concurrent players over its lifetime, so hype for its hack-and-slashing RPG sequel is at an all-time high as it prepares to jump into early access later today (see our Path of Exile 2 release times guide for more). That's no exaggeration either: Grinding Gear Games has just announced that more than one million people have redeemed keys for the free-to-play Path of Exile 2, and the game isn't even live yet. 

"We've just reached 1 million Early Access redemptions," the studio tweeted today. "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."

"We really didn't expect to have more than a million people online at the same time." To compensate for this, Grinding Gear says it has already "ordered way more card capacity and those servers will be coming online very soon," but for now, the team "quite frankly don't know what our backend services are going to be able to handle as we go above a million users... we're really not sure what kind of limits we might hit."

In any case, you might need to wait a couple of hours (or even a couple of days) before you can comfortably jump into Path of Exile 2.

You can occupy the wait with the 25 best RPGs available right now or switch genres entirely with our 25 best games of 2024 ranking.

Kaan Serin
Freelance contributor

Kaan freelances for various websites including Rock Paper Shotgun, Eurogamer, and this one, Gamesradar. He particularly enjoys writing about spooky indies, throwback RPGs, and anything that's vaguely silly. Also has an English Literature and Film Studies degree that he'll soon forget.