GSC said it couldn't put off Stalker 2 for bug fixes because 'one marathon' could have destroyed the developers: 'It's got some problems, but a game! It's a soulful game.

Stalker 2 is a great game. It's my game for the year. I said so in my Stalker 2 Review. It also launched with a lot bugs. GSC Game World, the developer, is releasing patches at an alarming rate. They seem to be working, but the question remains: why didn't they just delay the release?

Ievgen Grygorovych, the boss of GSC, explained the reason in a conversation with Eurogamer: it could have finally, completely broken the developers. "You are in a very intense work process for months before release and you're working at the highest stress possible... You have no energy and you decide - should we run another marathon?"

The answer is, of course, no. Grygorovych explained, "You're tired to the point that you'd die if we ran another marathon." The studio decided to finally release the game on which it had been working for 14 years, suffering delay after delay. "We didn't get a chance to say, let's do more. We only had the chance to say "let's do as much as we can until this moment, the release date."

Grygorovych acknowledges that the other part of this calculation is that moving Stalker 2 out of its end-of November window also moves it away from that Black Friday/Christmas sale window. I can imagine that the idea of delaying Stalker 2 to fix it further, only to be rewarded for your efforts with less sales after over a decade's worth of work and relocating your home country because of a Russian invasion did not appeal.

This meant that players got a buggy game and reviewers who played it before the release got a verybuggy one. This is reflected in all of the scores given to Stalker 2, in different outlets, across our wonderful games media landscape. It doesn't appear to have affected the game too badly: there are currently over 62,000 reviews of Stalker 2 on Steam, and 84% are positive.

"It isn't perfect, we have to fix it all, there are some issues," said Mariia Grygorovych. "But it is a game!" It's a soulful game, with feelings, love, and a lot of heart. You can't solve any problems if you don’t have a game."