S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 Takes Over Ukraine’s Internet

Everyone Wants To Get Into The Zone

S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 effectively crippled an entire nation’s internet due to its overwhelming popularity. On November 20th, the game’s launch day, Ukrainian internet providers Tenet and Triolan reported on their official Telegram channels that while the internet connection was normal and working during the day, the speed visibly plummeted by the evening—which was attributed to thousands of eager Ukrainian gamers downloading the game simultaneously. As translated by ITC, Triolan said, "Currently, there is a temporary decrease in Internet speed in all directions. This is due to the increased load on the channels due to the massive interest in the release of S.T.A.L.K.E.R."

Even those who actually managed to download the game still faced issues with logging in, noting that it was slow to load. The S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2-induced nationwide internet issue went on for hours until it was eventually resolved after all interested players managed to fully download their copy. In response to this, developer GSC Game World was both proud and shocked at the event.

"It was hard for the whole country and it's a bad thing because the internet is important, but at the same time it's like whoa!" shared creative director Mariia Grygorovych. "For us and our team what's most important is, for some people in Ukraine, they feel a little bit happier than they were before release," she continued. "We did something for our home country, something good for them."

With its popularity evident, it’s no surprise that S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 reached a whopping 1 million copies sold just two days after its release. Despite its glaring performance issues and numerous bugs, it sold exceedingly well across the world, especially in its home country of Ukraine.

GSC Game World is a Ukranian studio, whose current work setup is based in two different offices, one in Kyiv and the other in Prague. While there has been some difficulties getting the game out, with the ongoing conflict in Ukraine delaying the launch multiple times, GSC was determined to not delay it any longer and was able to release it last month in November. At present, the developer studio remains committed to putting out update patches to remedy the bugs that plague the game, optimizing and bringing out crash fixes; in fact, its third major patch was released earlier this week.