Stalker 2 is a hit. One million copies have officially been sold on PC and Xbox Series X and S, with many more playing on Game Pass. Reports coming out of Ukraine, where developer GSC Game World was originally based before a full-scale Russian invasion in 2022, indicate that Stalker 2 is already profitable. There is even talk of a Netflix series.
But what does this success mean for GSC Game World itself and the future of Stalker 2? IGN interviewed GSC CEO Ievgen Grygorovych and artistic director Maria Grygorovych at the BAFTA show on Piccadilly in London after a screening of the film War Game: Rise of the Stalker 2to ask whether Stalker 2’s sturdy sales were a game-changer for the developer.
Discussing the impact of releasing Stalker 2 in English, which is obviously not their first language, Ievgen and Maria talked about how the studio is now facing a “new reality” and with it a larger audience than ever. The first steps in this fresh reality will focus on working to improve Stalker 2 itself, which GSC has already done with many patches, but also on expanding plans for further support.
“You have to think carefully because we have a really large audience now and sometimes different parts of the audience want to see different things,” Maria cautioned.
“So we now have to live in this new reality, with a vibrant community, talk to them and try to understand them, maybe more deeply, because we really want our relationship to be good.”
Ievgen went into more detail, saying that while GSC’s plan for future video game development remains unchanged, it plans to invest even more in post-launch support for Stalker 2 than previously planned.
“About five, maybe six years ago, we had a plan of what we were going to do in the next 10, 15 years,” he revealed. “What projects do we want to implement, what will we look like? We’ve been slightly updating this plan over the years, pushing back the dates until the game is released.
“And so six years have passed and we still want to play the same games that we planned before and nothing has changed. The only thing that has changed is that we didn’t think we would want to spend much more time on Stalker 2 live updates after the game was released, that we would want to add a lot more things to this game in live updates.
What does this mean for Stalker 2 and its players? Ievgen confirmed that GSC is now able to add ideas that were forced to be removed from the game before launch because they weren’t ready, and even add new ideas that appeared after Stalker 2’s release.
“We didn’t expect that we would come back to improve Stalker 2 so often,” Ievgen explained. “And now we still have the same plan for 10, 15 years to develop other things that we want. But also putting a lot more into the development of Stalker 2.
“Because I actually love the world we built. I still find a lot of things we can improve and want to improve. And now we have players that we can do it for, that we have to do it for. It’s very motivating for me.”
These the same reports come from Ukraine suggest that Stalker 2 will receive at least two expansions and even a multiplayer mode, which could be one of the ideas Ievgen was talking about. There seems to be hope that the success of Stalker 2 will lend a hand put Ukraine on the game development map, just as CD Projekt’s The Witcher 2 did for Poland.
In the shorter term, updates will continue to fix Stalker 2’s issues, including a much-needed patch that improves a key A-Life 2.0 feature. Previously, GSC explained what went wrong with A-Life 2.0 in Stalker 2.
Wesley is the UK news editor at IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. Wesley can be reached at wesley_yinpoole@ign.com or confidentially at wy100@proton.me.
