AION 2 Peaked at 171,530 Steam Players in Paid Early Access; the Free-to-Play Launch Is 5 October

AION 2 reached 171,530 concurrent players on Steam on 30 September 2026, the day its paid early access opened, and it did that before a single free player could log in. NC's official server schedule on Steam puts the free-to-play global launch on 5 October 2026 at 13:00 UTC.

This piece is built on NC's own notices on the game's Steam page, the Steam store listing, and Steam's player chart and review counts, all read between 06:30 and 06:45 UTC on 3 October 2026. We have not played the game.

When does AION 2 launch for everyone?

Early access for Founder's Pack owners ends early on Monday 5 October, Europe time. NC then takes the servers down for eight hours before opening the doors to everyone. The schedule below is NC's, converted to the main time zones; NC notes that maintenance times can change.

How many people are playing AION 2 on Steam?

The 171,530 peak comes from SteamDB and was recorded on 30 September, the first day of early access. Steam's own concurrent-player chart is lower and more recent: at 06:32 UTC on 3 October it listed 92,585 people in game, eighth on Steam, with a peak of 137,372 in the previous 24 hours. That is a Saturday-morning figure in Europe and the middle of the night in the Americas, so it is not a like-for-like comparison with the first-day peak.

Getting in this week required a Founder's Pack, the cheapest of which costs $24.99 on Steam in the US. NC said on 30 September that AION 2 was number one on Steam's global top sellers and top in 13 countries, and Eurogamer reported that the packs out-earned EA Sports FC 27, Ace Combat 8 and Gears of War: E-Day that week. For scale, it sits in the same part of the chart as Valve's Deadlock, which set its own player record this week.

What went wrong in early access?

NC's own notices list what it has had to fix. Queues pushed it to open extra server pairs between 30 September and 2 October, most of them in Europe. A 90-minute maintenance on 1 October fixed a bottleneck that stalled several Hero Quests. The same day it patched early access status not being recognised and in-game purchases failing, and said it was still investigating account-linking problems. A review score in the mid-70s is respectable for an MMO's first week, but it reflects paying early adopters, not the free crowd arriving on Monday.

What does free to play include, and what costs money?

According to NC's launch FAQ, the game is free with optional paid cosmetics, a Battle Pass and a monthly membership. The membership is the part to watch: NC's description of it includes access to the Market, personal trading, remote storage and the Quna Exchange Shop, so the player economy sits behind it. Every Founder's Pack includes 30 days of membership. On Steam in the US the packs cost $24.99 (Standard), $49.99 (Deluxe) and $99.99 (Ultimate); Deluxe and Ultimate add cosmetic skins, and Ultimate adds a Black Dragon pet and wings.

What to do before Monday

• Pick your server with friends in mind. NC says Early Access characters will only be able to move between Early Access servers, not to launch servers, when free transfers open on 14 October. Dungeons are cross-server either way.
• Clear 100 GB of disk space. The store page recommends an SSD and lists a GTX 1050 Ti and 8 GB of RAM as the minimum, with an RTX 2070 and 16 GB recommended.
• Check your region. Server lists cover Europe, North America (East and West), Latin America and Asia; there is no dedicated Oceania or South-East Asia region.
• Do not expect your Korean or Taiwanese progress to follow you. NC's FAQ says nothing carries over from those versions, which launched on 18 November 2025.

What we don't know yet

NC has not said how many launch servers it will open on 5 October or how it will handle queues, and the price of the membership on its own is not on the Steam page. The real test is Monday afternoon in Europe, when the free audience arrives. We will add the launch-day numbers to this page and to our AION 2 hub.