Stalker 2 is a hit. Officially, it’s sold one million copies across 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 Russia’s full-scale invasion of the country in 2022, indicate Stalker 2 is already profitable. There’s 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 creative director Maria Grygorovych at BAFTA in Piccadilly, London following a screening of War Game: The Making of Stalker 2, to ask if Stalker 2’s big sales were a game-changer for the developer.
Discussing the impact of Stalker 2’s release in English, which is obviously not their first language, Ievgen and Maria talked about how the studio now faces “a new reality” and with it a bigger audience than it’s ever had to contend with. The first steps as part of this new reality will revolve around working to improve Stalker 2 itself, something GSC has already done with multiple patches, but also to expand its plans for continued support.
“You need to think properly because we now have a really big audience and sometimes different parts of this audience want to see different things,” Maria cautioned.
“So we need to live now with this new reality, with a live community and talking with them and try to understand them maybe deeper because we really want to make our relationship good.”
Ievgen went into more detail, saying that while GSC’s plan for the development of future video games remains unchanged, it plans to invest even more in post-launch support of Stalker 2 than it had previously earmarked.
“Around five years ago or maybe six years ago, we had a plan of what we were going to do in the nearest 10, 15 years,” he revealed. “What projects we want to do, how we're going to look like. And all these years we are slightly updating this plan by just moving the dates forward until we release the game.
“And so six years passed and we still want to do the same games as we planned earlier and nothing changed. The only things that changed is that we didn't think that we would like to invest much more time in live updates of Stalker 2 after game release, that we would want to add much more things in this game in live updates.”
What does this mean for Stalker 2 and its players, then? Ievgen confirmed that GSC is now in a position to add ideas it was forced to cut from the game before launch because they weren’t ready, and even add new ideas that have sprung up in the wake of Stalker 2’s release.
“We didn't expect that we would go back to improving Stalker 2 for a lot,” Ievgen explained. “And now we still have the same plan for 10, 15 years of development of other things we want. But also putting much more in development of Stalker 2.
“Because actually I love the world we built. I still find a lot of things that we can make better and we want to make better. And now we have players for whom we can do that, for whom we have to do that. And for me it's very driving.”
Those same reports coming out of Ukraine suggest Stalker 2 will get at least two expansions and even multiplayer, which may be one of the ideas Ievgen was talking about. The hope, it seems, is that Stalker 2’s success could help put Ukraine on the game development map, as CD Projekt’s The Witcher 2 had done for Poland.
In the shorter term, updates to fix issues with Stalker 2 continue, including a much-needed patch that improved the crucial A-Life 2.0 feature. Previously, GSC explained what went wrong with Stalker 2’s A-Life 2.0.
Wesley is the UK News Editor for IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at wesley_yinpoole@ign.com or confidentially at wyp100@proton.me.
