STALKER 2: Heart of Chornobyl is almost two years old at this point, and more information has come out about the deal developer GSC Game World struck up with Microsoft to make it a timed Xbox console exclusive.

Xbox shelled out more than Stalker 2’s dev cost to make it a timed exclusive

Although Xbox has a good number of talented first-party studios, it still makes deals with third-party teams to either publish their games, secure day one Game Pass releases, or even have games launch as timed exclusives on its platform. In 2024, perhaps Xbox’s biggest third-party timed exclusive was STALKER 2: Heart of Chornobyl, a game that launched as a day one Xbox Game Pass title and skipped a release on PlayStation.

STALKER 2 was all over Xbox’s marketing by late 2024, and was almost being treated as a first-party title with its artwork being spliced together in ads with big first-party Xbox games like Indiana Jones and the Great Circle and Hellblade 2. Those who were unknowing of STALKER 2‘s status as a third-party game might’ve thought it was a full-blown first-party Xbox title the way it was being marketed.

GSC Game World has spilled the beans about how much Xbox paid to have STALKER 2: Heart of Chornobyl be a one-year console exclusive. According to the studio’s founder, Sergiy Grygorovych, who spoke with gaming YouTuber OLDBoi, Xbox paid more than the development cost of STALKER 2 to secure the exclusivity deal that would see the game skip PS5 for a year and also launch day one on Game Pass.

STALKER 2‘s cost of development hasn’t been publicly disclosed by GSC Game World, but it’s estimated to have taken several tens of millions of dollars to produce. Grygorovych added that STALKER 2‘s trailer view counts online were the main driver that pushed Xbox to pursue the exclusivity deal, noting Xbox moved to pen the deal within a week of seeing the game’s trailers explode online.

There’s no question that the deal was stellar for GSC Game World, as it allowed the studio to recoup STALKER 2‘s development costs before the game even released, but it would be difficult to say the same for Xbox. Going after STALKER 2 to begin with seems like a strange move, regardless of how well its trailers did online. The STALKER series has always been very closely associated with PC; it’s not a franchise that’s necessarily set up to be a console seller, if that’s what Xbox was hoping for. With that said, Xbox does have the Game Pass argument, and while it might have given Game Pass a boost when it initially dropped in 2024, going as far as to make it exclusive to Xbox consoles seems unnecessary in hindsight, as simply nailing down a day one Game Pass deal, as Xbox has done with many other games of similar size and scale in the past, would’ve almost certainly been much less expensive.

STALKER 2: Heart of Chornobyl is available on Xbox, PlayStation, and PC.