Following Stalker 2’s Success, Developer GSC Game World Contends With ‘This New Reality’
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
Read more on ign.com
