Grinding Gear Games keeps Path of Exile 1 going alongside Path of Exile 2

Grinding Gear Games game directors Jonathan Rogers and Mark Roberts said at ExileCon 2026 in Auckland, New Zealand, on Nov. 7 that Path of Exile 1 will continue to run alongside Path of Exile 2 after the sequel officially launches as a free-to-play game on Dec. 11, 2026.

The studio now runs separate teams with separate people and resources for each game, Rogers said, a structure that keeps both launches on schedule. The two games share a single microtransactions shop, and purchased cosmetics and extra stash tabs carry over into both, which leaves Grinding Gear Games financially motivated to keep supporting the original.

Path of Exile 1 was approaching its thirteenth birthday when Rogers said hundreds of thousands of players entered the game every day. He said the studio would support the original forever unless players go away, because there is no reason to stop developing a game whose launches draw hundreds of thousands of concurrent users.

At ExileCon, Rogers said the game still enters the top three on Steam with every release and would remain popular enough to support even at one-third its current size. “We have no motivation to stop supporting POE 1,” Rogers said in a recent interview with Eurogamer.

Grinding Gear Games said on June 1, 2026, that Path of Exile 1’s updates were back on time and happening regularly after the separate-team structure was established. The studio can build a Path of Exile 1 league in four months and has done so 40 to 50 times, and it is returning to that cadence. Once Path of Exile 2 launches, Rogers said, the studio will run it as a live service using the same formula.

Path of Exile 2’s Return of the Ancients update launched on May 29, 2026, and pushed Steam concurrent player peaks above 400,000, aided by a free weekend and discount. The update reworked the endgame Atlas map and added major new questlines, and it brought the game to all mechanical requirements for Steam Deck Verification, pending Valve’s certificate. It marked the highest concurrent player counts since the sequel’s early access debut.

Version 1.0 of Path of Exile 2 will complete the six-act campaign with Acts 5 and 6, adding 24 new areas, 18 unique bosses, and over 20 named rare encounters, and will launch with 10 of its 12 promised playable classes. The Conquerors of Wraeclast challenge league launches alongside version 1.0, and migration of microtransactions from the original game will be only over halfway complete by Dec. 11. The early access period lasted two years.

Grinding Gear Games optimized Path of Exile 2’s installation by saving roughly 30 GB through a new fixed-camera model tool, but roughly 40 GB of new content is being added at the same time, so the net size will not decrease. Rogers said further reductions would require sacrificing quality, and he suggested a medium-texture download option that would leave about 60 GB unused but called it a pain to implement.

Grinding Gear Games does not expect to begin work on Path of Exile 3 for a very long time, and Mark Roberts said it would be forever away. Path of Exile Mobile’s code and engine still compile, but the game has not been in development for a while because the studio cannot sustain three games at once. A film or show adaptation is not Rogers’s thing and not something he would push for, though he would not say never, and Roberts expressed wariness, citing good game titles he has seen ruined.

Early Path of Exile 2 development hurt the original: the studio deprioritized Path of Exile 1 while building Acts 5 and 6 alongside early access updates, producing a long period without Path of Exile 1 launches. Rogers said the company was rightly criticized at the time, but the issue is now basically sorted out. He said in June that the studio intends to run the two games alongside each other rather than replacing the first, unlike Blizzard’s Overwatch 2 replacing Overwatch 1.

As of July 18, 2026, the core Path of Exile 1 development team numbered only a few dozen people, including designers, programmers, UI staff, and artists, and it used direct communication instead of management layers, so modification requests received feedback within minutes. The team was also lowering the barrier to entry for new players, planning to make the Crafting Bench more discoverable through additional town environments and to add an in-game keyword system explaining equipment and skill keywords.

Grinding Gear Games reuses art assets such as monster models, animations, and boss designs between the two games, and some Path of Exile 1 boss content originated from Path of Exile 2 asset reuse. The studio hopes the games will mutually promote each other, with Path of Exile 2 attracting new players and Path of Exile 1 retaining its core base.