Path of Exile 2 director didn't expect early access launch to be studio's biggest success yet, and that caused complications

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.