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Forbes

‘Last Epoch' Season 2 Blasts Off With Massive Player Retention

Last Epoch Last Epoch This is not meant to be a negative, but between ARPG heavy hitters like Path of Exile 2 and Diablo 4, Last Epoch, a new IP that first arrived as a demo back in its Kickstarter days in 2018, had a steep hill to climb. That resulted in a number of tests and betas before it finally released in full in February of 2024. Now, season 2 of Last Epoch has arrived quite a while later, but it's player retention is so far rather stunning. Last Epoch launched in February 2024 with a stellar 264,000 concurrent playercount on Steam (it's PC only, and has remained that way). Now? Season 2, over a year later, is here and has already gotten 150,000 concurrent players, but is likely to have pushed higher by the time you read this over the course of the weekend. It's certainly possible that it goes north of 200,000, which again, for this game, for this long of a gap, is really excellent, and it's been easy to see a lot of games experience significant drop-offs even with new content releases. Last Epoch Steamdb There's no free-to-play caveat here to boost numbers either. The game costs $35 with up to $65 ultimate edition versions. It's at 77% Mostly Positive on Steam, with 88% Very Positive in the last month. Again, excellent. Last Epoch actually moved this season 2 release date specifically because it was going to be just two days after Path of Exile 2's huge update, and it didn't want to get squashed. Interestingly, Path of Exile 2's April 4 update peaked at 238,000 concurrents, not all that far away from what Last Epoch may hit here. And this is Path of Exile we're talking about, a massive ARPG franchise. However, this update rankled the PoE playerbase with severe nerfs that have had to be slowly rolled back in time. But not before the game got a 39% Most Negative score on Steam for the past month. In an industry often filled with bad news these days, it's nice to see a game like Last Epoch do well after so much hard work, and break through to an audience that clearly has enjoyed the new take on the ARPG genre. I played a bunch back at launch, and I expect to dive in soon, provided I can pry myself away from the mysteries of Blue Prince, which is no small feat. Follow me on Twitter, YouTube, and Bluesky Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy.