The story of GSC Game World’s highly anticipated game Stalker 2’s journey to the Xbox platform has surprisingly started on Reddit. The details revealed by the studio in an interview with Windows Central provide quite an interesting insight into how an independent game studio communicates with a major platform owner.
The Stalker 2 process began with a Google search
The representative of the Ukrainian game studio GSC Game World revealed that their first contact with Microsoft happened in quite an unusual way. Initially, the studio had no connections within Microsoft. As a solution, they started searching Google for Xbox president Phil Spencer’s email address and finally found this information in a Reddit thread.
The GSC team introduced themselves in an email to Spencer, expressing their desire to bring Stalker to console players. Interestingly, Spencer responded almost immediately, connecting the studio with the right Xbox team. This unexpected beginning eventually turned into a productive partnership. The GSC representative stated, “We continue working with the Xbox team, we love them. We find them very effective and empathetic.”
As a result of this collaboration, Stalker 2 will be exclusively released on November 20 for Xbox Series X|S and PC platforms. Additionally, the game will be available on Xbox Game Pass from the day of its release. This deal is seen as an important step for the studio, which has gone through a challenging development process.
This interesting story also highlights how independent game developers sometimes need to resort to unconventional methods to communicate with large companies. However, the fact that Phil Spencer’s email address surfaced in this way makes one wonder if we might see other stories where people attempt similar methods to reach him.
