GSC Game World, kurucusunun Stalker 2'nin Xbox finansmanı iddiasına karşı çıktı.

GSC Game World has taken the rare step of publicly contradicting its own founder. This week, Sergiy Grygorovych told Ukrainian YouTuber OLDBoi that Microsoft paid the studio more to keep Stalker 2: Heart of Chornobyl off PlayStation than the game cost to make. The developer now says that account does not match what happened.

Grygorovych described the timed Xbox console exclusivity as a deal that erased the game's budget before a single copy sold. He said he is still under a non-disclosure agreement and would not name a figure, though he was clear about the shape of it: the money from Xbox came in higher than the cost of building the game.

"It paid for itself before the first day."

— Sergiy Grygorovych

By his telling, a few things lined up for Microsoft to move. The company had cash on hand, it wanted a point on the board against Sony, and Stalker 2's reveal trailer had pulled big numbers on YouTube. Some of those clips still sit in the millions of views. Once the decision was made, it happened fast.

"They brought in all the documents for signing in about a week."

— Sergiy Grygorovych

GSC answered through a statement to Insider Gaming. The studio said it had meant to stay quiet, then changed its mind, worried that saying nothing would be read as agreement.

"...as continued silence may be perceived as confirmation of information that is simply not true."

— GSC Game World

The core of the rebuttal is about distance. GSC says Grygorovych was never positioned to speak to an Xbox deal in the first place.

"In accordance with the agreements reached between the parties, Sergiy was not involved either in negotiations with partners regarding S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 or in the actual development of the game throughout its full production cycle. We have always fully honored these agreements on our side. For this reason, his comments regarding the company's activities cannot be considered an accurate reflection of the actual state of affairs."

— GSC Game World

Read the statement closely and one detail stands out: it never puts a number against Grygorovych's number. It does not say Xbox paid less than the budget, or that the exclusivity money was small. It disputes the source rather than the figure, then hands the credit that matters to another name. GSC says owner Max Krippa funded the majority of the development budget, and it thanked players, partners, and the Ukrainians defending the country alongside him. Coverage of the original interview noted Grygorovych stressed he could not name a number because of the NDA, which makes the studio's silence on the figure harder to read.

Knowing who is who helps here. Sergiy Grygorovych started GSC in the 1990s and built it on the Cossacks strategy series long before Stalker made the studio famous. He shut the company down in 2011 and stepped away from games; his brother Ievgen refounded it in 2014 and steered it back to work, first on Cossacks 3 and then, from 2018, on the sequel that would take the next six years to finish. Sergiy has not run the studio for over a decade. Today it is owned by Krippa. So a headline about a company correcting its founder is really a current owner and a former one giving different versions of the same deal.

I read his numbers with the rest of his year in mind. The studio that wants this behind it has reason to shrink an old payday, and the founder has reason to inflate one. I keep coming back to the fact that this founder is fighting his old company over the Cossacks rights while pitching a crypto-and-AI project called S.T.R.A.N.G.E.R. to investors. I don't buy that either side is lying outright, but I trust the size of neither claim.

GSC framed the disagreement as a matter of record, saying the story of the game should rest on facts rather than "assumptions or subjective opinions." It also called Stalker 2 one of the most difficult projects in the history of the industry, which, given how the game was made, is not marketing.

That backdrop is worth holding onto. GSC built Stalker 2 through Russia's 2022 invasion of Ukraine, moved staff out of Kyiv, and delayed the release more than once. The deal with Microsoft covered console exclusivity rather than the platform outright: the game was always a PC title, it launched day one on Xbox Game Pass, and what Microsoft bought was a year of keeping it off PlayStation. When it arrived on PC and Xbox Series X/S in late 2024, it ran rough, and reviews said so. The studio kept working, shipping major patches for performance, AI behavior, and animation across the following year. The PlayStation 5 version landed in November 2025, the same month the Xbox exclusivity window closed.

Now GSC wants attention back on the game rather than the accounting.

"We hope that such public statements will not distract attention from what truly matters to the team today. GSC Game World is currently putting the finishing touches on a significant update for S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2, as well as its first large-scale story DLC. We will be sharing more details very soon."

— GSC Game World

That DLC is the Cost of Hope release, the expansion GSC has teased since a story trailer earlier this summer. It adds a new protagonist, Mavka, and brings back familiar characters from the original Stalker trilogy, among them Duty leader General Voronin, voiced by Ukrainian actor Oleksii Horbunov, who also serves as his face model, and the Clear Sky scientist Suslov, who helps dig into the secrets of Project X. A leak put its install size past 200 GB, and GSC is expected to release a large Patch 2.0 before it lands. Cost of Hope is set for PC, Xbox Series X/S, and PS5 this summer.

GSC recently (December 2025) expanded Heart of Chornobyl with a free update tied to the game's PlayStation debut, adding a questline around the Malachite area in the west of the map, eight missions across seven new locations, six new characters, the GP37V2 rifle, and a new hub in the Burnt Forest.