It started with a progress bar stuck at 97% for a 120+ GB file.
I’d been looking forward to jumping into the new Path of Exile 2 league. They added a lot of new content I wanted to check out. I pre-downloaded the patch on Steam hours earlier. When it was launch time, I couldn’t get the game past 97% because there was another patch. Then it was stuck at 99%. Then I got an error that no PC user wants to see: corrupted files. I tried again and got the same result.
I switched to the launcher PoE 2’s developer Grinding Gear Games (GGG) had, and got a different error. Something about files not matching a hash. Translation: the game refused to install correctly, and it wouldn’t tell me why in English.
So I did what most of us do. I went online searching for help.
Here’s where things got messy.
The Machines That Told Me to Buy New Hardware
At the top of my search results? AI-generated answers. One after another, they pointed at my computer being the problem. Check your RAM. Verify your drivers. Maybe your hard drive is failing. The message was clear: this is your problem to fix.
I spent hours going down that road. Checking hardware. Running diagnostics. Restarting, reinstalling, reverifying files. All of it pointless.
Meanwhile, streamers were playing the game without any issues. Forums were filling up with thousands of players reporting the exact same errors I was seeing. Download failures, login loops, the game crashing or freezing. It wasn’t my computer that was the problem. It was never my computer.
So why did the AIs tell me it was?
AI-powered search results are trained on older data. They pattern-match to the most common answers. “Check your hardware” is almost always in that pool. But there’s also a subtler issue at play: the systems suggesting those answers are often the same ones that get a kickback when you buy a new SSD or upgrade your RAM. Is that an elaborate conspiracy? Probably not. But it’s a conflict of interest baked into the infrastructure. The incentive to sell you something is not aligned with the directive to give you accurate information.
Nobody warns you about that when you start troubleshooting. Think about someone who isn’t tech-savvy. A parent who bought their kid a game for the weekend. A casual player who doesn’t know what a hash error means or that server problems even exist. They read “corrupted files,” Google it, and an AI confidently tells them their hard drive might be dying or their RAM is failing. They panic, spend money. Or they just give up, thinking the game or their computer is broken.
That’s not a small thing.
So What Actually Happened?
GGG made a decision. Several decisions, actually, all stacked on top of each other on the same day.
They launched a major new league, a seasonal content reset (with new game mechanics) that brings a flood of returning players back to the game. At the same time, they drastically increased the size of the game by adding a large amount of new content. On top of that, they ran a free-access weekend, letting anyone play for free. And they paired it with a 50% off sale to coincide with college students being out of school.
Each of those things, on its own, would spike server load. Together? It was like opening every door of a stadium at once and being surprised the hallways were jammed.
This wasn’t unpredictable. It was announced weeks in advance. The fan community saw it coming. The math wasn’t complicated.
Path of Exile 2 is a game with a paid early access model, meaning players had already paid to be there. They bought in early to support development and get first access. And on launch day, the people who had paid couldn’t reliably get in, while the promotional campaign was running at full speed.
This Isn’t Just One Company
Last week Star Citizen, a game that has been in development for over a decade and is famous for its ambitions and troubled history, ran its annual event called DefenseCon. At the same time, they offered a ship package priced at $5,000 (yes, five thousand real dollars) alongside other ships for sale, plus a free-play weekend. Their servers, which struggle under normal conditions, buckled under the traffic.
Star Citizen has a fiercely loyal community. They’ve waited years (seriously, over a decade). And on one of the biggest events of their year, the servers couldn’t hold up.
Destiny 2 is another example. Bungie made one of the most devoted player communities in gaming. Players logged thousands of hours, formed friendships, built identities around that game. Then corporate decisions eroded it with:
- Paid expansions that felt incomplete
- Older content being permanently removed from the game players had paid for
- Seasonal models that punished anyone who couldn’t play constantly.
The audience didn’t disappear overnight. It bled out slowly, because of bad decisions. Bungie was eventually acquired by Sony, for $3.6 billion. Now, Bungie’s most successful game is not being updated anymore.
Speaking of Sony: they spent enormous resources chasing the live service model. Games designed to keep players logging in indefinitely through recurring content, battle passes, and microtransactions.
Concord, one of their biggest bets, launched in 2024 and shut down within two weeks. It sold so few copies that the number became a punchline. Sony has since pulled back from that strategy. It appears they’ve learned something. The question is whether other companies will.
The Real Cost Is Goodwill And It Doesn’t Grow Back
Player goodwill is a finite resource. That’s the thing corporations keep treating as if it’s infinite.
Every time a launch is botched, every time a player spends hours troubleshooting a problem that wasn’t theirs, every time someone pays for access and can’t get in… a little bit of trust is spent. And it doesn’t regenerate instantly just because the patch eventually worked or the servers stabilized by Tuesday.
I uninstalled Path of Exile 2 that morning. I decided that I was done with the game.
Then I wondered if the problem had been fixed. So I reinstalled it. Steam throttled my download to around 75 MB/s, a sign of how much strain was still on the network. The game was downloaded with corrupted files. I clicked verify files. This time, it worked. The “ready to play” sound played. The popup appeared like an achievement.
And I felt… nothing. Or close to nothing.
There was no excitement or relief. I was just tired.
That part is hard to explain to someone who hasn’t lived through decades of this. It’s not about one bad launch. It’s cumulative. It’s World of Warcraft’s infamous install bar. Players used to joke that the real final boss was the blue download bar you had to defeat before you could even play. It’s every server outage on a game’s opening weekend. It’s every “we’re aware of the issue” tweet that arrives four hours too late. It’s buying a game and watching it get gutted by decisions made in a boardroom by people who don’t play it.
I have no desire to play live service games anymore. To be fair, I enjoy playing with my friends but do strangers add anything to my gaming experience? No, I usually play solo. Which is a topic for another article – more and more people play live service games solo. Path of Exile 2 is an excellent example of that.
What Should Happen Instead
This isn’t a complicated fix. Gaming companies should be prioritizing players over short-term revenue spikes.
Launch the league first. Get the existing, paying player base in. Make sure the servers hold. Work out the bugs. Give it a week or two.
Then open the free weekend.
Then run the sale.
The league lasts several months. There’s no shortage of time. Spreading these events out would actually serve the business better. Each one draws in a fresh wave of attention and new players, instead of one chaotic flood that breaks everything and leaves people frustrated.
Unfortunately, a common sense approach that values patience doesn’t show up as a number on a quarterly earnings report.
Where This Leaves Us
I still have Path of Exile 2 installed. I might play it. It’s genuinely a good game when it works, and the developers who built it deserve credit for that.
But I’ve also been thinking about my backlog. Baldur’s Gate 3, one of the most acclaimed games in recent years, is sitting unfinished on my drive. I just reinstalled it. I also downloaded Guardians of the Galaxy after I finally finished watching the movies. Witcher 3 (which has an upcoming DLC releasing in 2027) is unfinished. I’d like to finish XCOM 2 and put my brain to work.
Imagine, if I immersed myself in Baldur’s Gate 3 instead of beating my head against a wall trying to get into a live service game where corporate executives thought cramming everyone together was a good idea… and expecting it to work.
Waiting 24 hours gave me a completely different experience, didn’t it?
At some point, the only real leverage players have is their wallet and their attention. Time is the one thing you can’t get back. Spending it on companies that repeatedly make it clear they don’t respect it isn’t loyalty. It’s a bad habit.
A bad habit that should have been broken a long time ago.
