Path of Exile 2 brought back 40% of its player count with Dawn of The Hunt despite abysmal day-one experience

Modified Apr 05, 2025 17:00 IST

Path of Exile 2 player count — Despite a rough start, players still came out in droves to try Path of Exile 2 Dawn of the Hunt (Image via Grinding Gear Games)

According to SteamDB, Path of Exile 2 brought back a significant number of players, despite Dawn of The Hunt having an incredibly rocky start. Disconnects, bugs, players not dealing damage, crashes, everything that could go wrong did go wrong. When Early Access launched initially, it managed to crash SteamDB, and over 500K players were logged in two days in a row.

While the Dawn of The Hunt update didn’t bring quite that many players back to Path of Exile 2, 40% of that is still nothing to sneeze at. It’s quite impressive. At the time of writing, there are over 100K people logged in, and that’s not counting consoles.

What led players to keep playing Path of Exile 2’s Dawn of The Hunt update, even with poor performance?

The latest 24-hour peak in Path of Exile 2’s SteamDB chart is 238,836 — quite a bit shy of the 578,569 that the game enjoyed at its peak. However, about 40% or so of the all-time peak is still very impressive. What makes this even more impressive is that day one (April 4, 2025) was a miserable experience for the vast majority of players.

Despite the frustration, players are still coming in by the droves to tackle this new content (Image via SteamDB)

There are still issues with Nvidia Reflex, and players had to constantly change their Renderer in the menus to either prevent lag or crashing. You were going to be stuck with one or the other. It took a few hours to hit me yesterday, but when it did, I couldn’t stay logged in for more than a few moments. Switching to the Vulkan renderer did help with the lag, but then the crashes hit.

It would take six or seven tries just to get back into Path of Exile 2. So what is keeping all these players around when so many are just frustrated? It’s likely to do with the goodwill the game has so far. The developers have done quite a bit to keep the game feeling fun and fresh, though a lot of that went away with patch 0.2.0’s nerfs and changes.

While we cannot truly know what’s in any one player’s head, it does sound like people are willing to give them the benefit of the doubt. There’s been at least one hotfix that went out to reduce early-level enemy health due to how tanky they felt.

There are players who are incredibly frustrated by this experience, but there are at least as many sticking it out and hoping Grinding Gear Games will change the things they’re frustrated with. Nonetheless, the game is doing quite well from a numbers standpoint, just a day into the latest update.

Check out our other Path of Exile 2 guides and features

About the author

Jason is an Esports and Gaming journalist at Sportskeeda holding an amazing 11 years of experience under his belt. Having put out 4000-plus articles and amassing over 12 million reads for Sportskeeda, he is among the company’s most experienced writers. Jason holds a Bachelor's degree in English from UNC Pembroke and was inspired to become a gaming journalist very early on in life after reading Nintendo Power.

Jason is a jack of all trades when it comes to gaming journalism. He’s a key writer in Sportskeeda's MMO department, but he also likes to help out in other categories, like streamers, RPG, card games, and whatever else is needed. A solo gamer at heart, Jason's favorite titles include Earthbound and Dragon Warrior.

Jason places high value on accuracy and relevance in his write-ups. He achieves this with thorough research to sift facts from rumors. One of the biggest highlights of his career is his interview with Canadian pro wrestler Kenny Omega about his inclusion in the Like a Dragon game series. He is also good friends with journalist Kazumo Hashimoto, who he admires for the kind of stories he works on and his deep ethics.

A true cinephile, one of Jason’s primary hobbies involves enjoying cinematic experiences. He also loves reading, be it fiction or manga, when not working. Additionally, he streams on Twitch and posts his gaming insights on YouTube.

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Edited by Abhipsito Das