After closing down back in 2011, the original creator of STALKER: Call of Pripyat GSC Gameworld has re-opened for business. It has a brand new website and even a new project in the works.
“We don’t think free-to-play is the right model for the game we want to make. So we’re making an old-fashioned, full price game, we think our audience will be happy about that. We’re expecting a lot of our old audience!”, spokesperson Valentine Yeltyshev told Gamesindustry.biz.
That’s all we’ve been told about the new project, but Yeltyshev did discuss the previous breakdown of the company in 2011, which he blamed on an unfortunate combination of several issues.
“It was a difficult decision,” says Yeltyshev, “because the team was working towards a full-scale game, but they and our CEO understood that the game just wouldn’t be at the level we wanted from STALKER 2. There was also a problem getting interest, and the right money, from publishers. We were offered funding once we reached alpha. Actually we would have been able to fund the entire development ourselves, but we still weren’t sure we’d be able to sell it once we’d got to alpha.”
Oh, and interestingly enough, Yeltyshev has a few words about the ongoing saga of West Games, the studio that claimed it was a former team of STALKER Developers creating a “spiritual successor” to the game.
“When we were working on STALKER 2,” explains Yeltyshev, “we were also planning on releasing a browser game based on STALKER so we could keep the audience engaged until released. That project was never finished. There were mistakes. But the guys at West Games, that was the STALKER project they were working on — a Flash game. So when they promoted themselves as having worked on STALKER, I was quite surprised.”
Funnily enough, West Games is currently running a crowd-funding campaign for a game called STALKER Apocalypse. It doesn’t seem likely that the project will see the light of day, considering that its only raised $15,000 on its goal of $600,000 with 79 days to go, but Yeltyshev says that if the two companies came into conflict GSC would have the upper hand.
“We would definitely win the legal action against them, but we won’t start it. They used a lot of the ideas from STALKER… I don’t know what they were thinking, starting that. I haven’t heard from them for quite a while.”
