As we already mentioned in a previous article, STALKER 2: Heart of Chornobyl is a powerful soft power tool in the context of the war between Ukraine and Russia. Thus, the brand new game from GSC Game World finds itself at the heart of a Russian propaganda campaign.
STALKER 2 is the victim of a Russian disinformation campaign
404 Media reported that a fake propaganda video using the WIRED media watermark was shared on Telegram and in emails to the press. It is explained in this famous video that STALKER 2 would be used to enlist more Ukrainian soldiers and that it would secretly collect private data from players.
“The Ukrainian game STALKER 2 helps the government locate citizens who may be mobilized. An embedded program was discovered in the game's code that collects player data and transmits it to the developer's servers. The program collects data about the player's device, name, IP address and current location. This information is transmitted every second. »
We can also read in the video that the development studio, GSC Game World, would have reached an agreement with the Ukrainian government to obtain funds for the game, and that it would in return help them “find men who could be mobilized.”
Obviously, absolutely nothing proves that this is actually the case and the video was in no way produced by WIRED.
404 Media explains that it has already been the target of such content using the same methods and the same network. This maneuver was named “Operation Matryoshka”. AFP explained at the start of the year that “pro-Russian propaganda continues to flood social networks and European countries, with the aim in particular of undermining Western support for kyiv”.
David Chavalarias, mathematician in social sciences and research director at the CNRS, explained that he sees in this campaign a “diversionary enterprise aimed at fact-checkers” in order to “occupy them with crude subjects, difficult to verify”.
It's not so surprising that STALKER 2 finds itself at the center of such maneuvers. In any case, players seem to adhere to GSC Game World's proposal, since in addition to having already sold more than a million copies at the time of writing these lines, the title has already collected over 62,794 reviews on Steam, 84% of which are positive, which is significantly higher than the Metacritic average based on press reviews.
If you want to form your own opinion on the game, you can play it on Xbox Series X|S, as well as on PC via Steam, GOG and the Windows Store. It integrated Xbox Game Pass Ultimate, PC Game Pass and Xbox Cloud Gaming upon launch.
