Pre-sales for Path of Exile 2 are probably in full swing. Now the boss of the game explains how many players there will be on the server.
Why should there be a rush? Path of Exile 2 pre-sales are already in full swing. On Friday, December 6th, 2024, the game will go into early access on all platforms at 8:00 p.m. Path of Exile 2 is highly anticipated by fans. Days before the actual release, the game is already in the top three best-selling games on Steam (via SteamDB).
The latest videos – such as the almost 80-minute YouTube video about the endgame content with over 3 million views and the gameplay trailer on YouTube with 2.6 million views – also reflect the great interest of the players.
It’s easier for the developers who can see how many copies of the game have already been sold. The chief developer of the hack & slay adventure is now giving an indication of how many there can really be.
You can see the game’s cinematic intro here:
Path of Exile 2: The cinematic intro of Diablo’s biggest competitor
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5 times as many players as Path of Exile
How many players are you expecting? Game director Jonathan Rogers said in an interview (via YouTube) that the developers spoke to service providers about the game’s capabilities. The team is planning to launch Path of Exile 2 with one million instances.
An instance is a map that currently exists on the server. In Path of Exile, players were also able to keep multiple instances active by switching back and forth between them. It is still uncertain whether this will also work in Path of Exile 2.
In the interview, Rogers explained that they were expecting a million players. That would be about 5 times as many as Path of Exile had at its all-time high in July 2024 on Steam. At that time, almost 230,000 players were online in PoE at the same time (via SteamDB).
Based on the pre-orders, the developers can already see how many potential players will try out their game over the weekend. Even though pre-sales on PS5 only start 24 hours before release, the team certainly already has a good idea of what’s to come at EA’s launch.
What if there are more players? In the event that more than a million players play at the same time, the developers have already spoken to their server providers in advance. While only one million players will find space on the servers on Friday, capacity can probably be increased afterwards.
In one test, the development team was even able to create 1.6 million instances before the limit was reached. The creators’ goal is to increase this number to 2 million instances before the game launches on Friday.
However, the boss emphasizes that 2 million simulated instances is not the same as 2 million real players. If you want to find out more about early access for Path of Exile 2, you can find a summary of the most important information here: Path of Exile 2 – Early Access: All information about the start, preload and costs for PC and PS5