Path of Exile 2 is now in early access and doing big numbers on Steam and Twitch–the latter partially because there are some free rewards to claim for the dark-fantasy ARPG just by watching.
There will be two weeks of free Twitch Drops for Path of Exile 2, with different rewards each week. For week one, players just need to watch for three hours between December 6-14 to snag the Energising Bolt Flask effect and the Halo of the Righteous helmet attachment. Week two, from December 14-22, also requires three hours of Path of Exile watched on Twitch but only grants one reward–the Temporal Lord’s portal effect.
Those who participate in the game’s support-a-streamer initiative by purchasing or gifting two Twitch subscriptions from December 6-22 will additionally earn a Chimera pet. To claim all the rewards, players will need to link their Path of Exile account with their Twitch account after having watched for the required amount of time.
The existence of Twitch drops, and a high-level of hype among ARPG fans, led to Path of Exile 2 surpassing 1.1 million viewers on Twitch, beating out Diablo 4’s peak Twitch viewership of 954,000. Those huge numbers came even as the game’s servers failed to go live on time, resulting in viewers simply watching streamers stare at the Path of Exile 2 login screen and discuss their plans for the game.
More than 1 million players paid $30 for early access to what will eventually be a free-to-play game, blowing past developer Grinding Gear Games’ initial expectations. As a result, the developer worked to deploy more servers and upgrade its databases to prepare for the influx of players, causing a slight delay to the early access launch. Game director Jonathan Rogers warned there will likely be login queues and server issues for Path of Exile 2’s inaugural weekend, and that he wasn’t sure how the game’s backend services would hold up under the bigger-than-anticipated player counts.
For more on the next-generation ARPG, be sure to read up on how cross-play and cross-progression work in Path of Exile 2, as well as everything you need to know about the game’s early-access period.
