Stalker 2’s been through an interesting development cycle to say the least, one that’s certainly demanded a lot of developer GSC Game World. As it turns out, one of the minor demands that came of the studio in its efforts was a hunt for Xbox boss Phil Spencer’s email address on Reddit.
If you’re out of the loop, GSC’s endured a uniquely tough development process as it’s worked on this sequel to the original cult classic shooter. However, following some delays, it’s now at the stage of showing folks what it’s done ahead of a November 20 release.
The main platforms you’ll be able to play Stalker on when it does come out are Xbox-related, after the developer struck a deal for the game to exclusively arrive on Series X|S and PC, at least at launch, as well as Game Pass. Thanks to an interview between GSC and Windows Central, we now know how that arrangement ended up coming to be.
“We actually started with zero contacts inside Microsoft,” a representative for the studio revealed, “We started searching Google for an email for Phil Spencer, and we ended up finding it on some Reddit thread.
“It was an email that was essentially ‘We are GSC Game World, we’re interested in bringing Stalker to console players.’ We got a near-instant response and a connection to the correct team. We’ve been working until now with the Xbox team, we love them, we think they are very effective and very empathetic.”
So, there you go. While it’s nice that this happened, especially given everything the Stalker team’s been through, I can’t imagine Spencer’ll feel too good about the idea of folks now potentially combing through posts and threads in the hopes of being able to tell him they like his Hexen t-shirt.
If you want to get an idea of what you’ll be in for when you finally fire up Stalker, be it on Xbox Series S or something else, make sure to check out our fresh preview of it.