[2022] Happy New Year! A 2021 Retrospective

It's hard to believe that we've already made it to the end of 2021! As we start to welcome in the new year, we wanted to take a moment to look back on the year that was.

In 2021:

• We launched four expansions: Echoes of the Atlas, Ultimatum, Expedition and Scourge!


• Despite New Zealand borders still being closed due to COVID, we expanded from 149 to 165 in-house staff members. In fact, we have so many people now that we are renovating a third floor of our office building! Photos coming in a few months when the space is ready.


• We've been continuing to work on Path of Exile 2 and have released another trailer and gameplay preview.


• We deployed more than 100 updates/patches to our realm.


• We posted 442 news articles - an average of 8.5 posts per week.


• We set a record number of players online (265,250 on our server alone - up by 11% from our previous record of 237,160).


• Around 5.3 million different players played Path of Exile on our international realm.


• 2021 had the second-highest overall playtime per year, with over 483 million hours played on our international realm


• We reintroduced Path of Exile: Royale.


• We ran two Twitch Rivals Tournaments.


• We hosted another Halloween meeting.


• We improved clicking.


• We celebrated the 15th anniversary of Grinding Gear Games.


• We introduced the best bug of all time.

Thank you so much for joining us for another year in Wraeclast. We couldn't do this without you! We have lots of exciting things planned for the year ahead, beginning with our 3.17.0 expansion, which we'll be revealing in the coming weeks. Happy New Year, Exiles!