15 hours before release, Path of Exile 2 hits a million Early Access key sales

There's only half a day to go before the Early Access release of Path of Exile 2, arguably the most anticipated ARPG of the decade. A mere 15 hours before its slated release time (December 6, 7 pm UTC), Game Director Jonathan Rogers announced that they have hit one million Early Access key redemptions. This means there will almost certainly be over a million people trying to play the game across all consoles later today.

While this is a big success for a paid early-access to a game that will eventually go F2P, it also means GGG has hit a bit of a snag. This release will be a live stress test for how well the Path of Exile 2 servers can hold up.

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There's a good chance Path of Exile 2 servers will be overloaded on release

It's not surprising that Path of Exile 2 key sales have been snowballing. According to the Steam top sellers chart, purchases have been soaring throughout the last week, and we estimate that the same is likely true of the console versions. Whether or not Diablo GM Rod Fergusson's comment has added fuel to the fire, this is one of the biggest releases of the year despite the early-access tag.

While this is a reason to rejoice for both GGG and players, it comes with a side order of concern. During an interview between Game Director Jonathan Rogers and Zizaran, it was revealed that GGG thought the chances of hitting the million-sales milestone were "pretty low", so one million is the maximum instance capacity that their servers can handle.

Now that the "suffering from success" scenario has happened, they are underprepared for the rush of potentially over a million players on launch. As Jonathan Rogers explained about their stress test in the interview with Zizaran:

"We've got a synthetic test that goes up to... 1.6 million (simulated users) in the backend before it falls over, and we want to try and improve that to two million before we launch (...) But the thing is, that's a synthetic test, right? ... We ride a bot that simulates what a player does, but like, what if we're just wrong about that?"

Stress-testing bots cannot comprehensively simulate player behavior and movement from one instance to another, so it's possible that instance manager-related crashes and disconnects user-end will abound over the course of the Path of Exile 2 release weekend.

In today's announcement, Jonathan said they've "already ordered way more cloud capacity, and those servers will be coming online very soon". However, he added:

"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. Now, we've added more database shards, scaling everything we have up as far as it'll go. But we're really not sure what kind of limits we might hit."

At any rate, it's likely that players will encounter server queues at launch and may experience some disconnects after stepping into Wraeclast.

In other news, pre-downloads for Path of Exile 2 have gone live, so you can at least keep your files prepared locally beforehand.