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Despite Stalker 2's "rough edges" its opening day player count is huge

Although bugs and performance issues are plaguing the FPS, Stalker 2 has peaked at well over 100,000 players on Steam on its first day.

It's been a bit of a rollercoaster of an opening day for Stalker 2 – but then again, its entire development has been far from plain sailing. First came some extremely varied critic reviews, then came reports of some pretty concerning performance issues and bugs, but spliced in between all of that is some immense popularity. Despite its issues, it is enjoying massive player counts on Steam, cementing itself as one of the biggest PC releases of the year.

While our own review of FPS game itself, with bugs and performance issues being widely reported. With the game in the public's hands, countless similar reports are coming through.

This has now been acknowledged by GSC in a new post on social media. In it, the studio understandably looks back on the game's incredibly turbulent development and expresses immense pride in its release, describing it as "a project of endless love and ion." However, it also takes time to address the tech issues.

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"S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 is a massive game. We understand that in such a game, there may still be rough edges: we literally haven't released anything of this scale before. We're absolutely committed to being here, monitoring your , and quickly fixing any issues that need our attention. In the first days after release, we'll be working with hotfixes, rolling them out as precisely as possible, but as frequently as we can. Then, we'll switch to larger updates that include constant improvements."

GSC also promises in its message that free in-game content will arrive in the future, with a roap set to be shared in December.

Even with all of the technical gremlins, hordes of players have been enjoying Stalker 2 on Steam during its debut day. Its peak concurrent player count has topped out at 113,587, with roughly 90,000 people still playing at the time of writing.

Stalker 2: A graph showing the opening day player count for Stalker 2

If you're diving in for yourself this week, make sure you've got some of our guides nearby to help you survive. Here we give you everything you need to know about the Stalker 2 artifacts.

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