Make your bets, what excuses we'll get for them cutting DLC's from 3 to 2 and probably down to 1 eventually.
There are several things that could fit a bingo card:
- The war card. It's their strongest and most unchallengeable excuse. Escalation, displacement, developer losses. No consumer can openly argue with it in fear of being labelled as a Russian detractor, paid anti-shill, or someone with a vendetta because the game wasn't 1:1 of the past trilogy. It's also been used continuously since 2022 and will remain available pretty much indefinitely. Caveat here is that it's clearly already getting thin and people seem to slowly disregard it.
- The UE5 upgrade ate everything. They've already flagged that the engine migration "could shake up the timing of other updates" and framed it in terms of delays being risks they're willingly taking. The scaffolding for this excuse is already built and ready. If the second or third DLC quietly disappears, I'm expecting the engine migration to absorb part of the blame from them.
- Scope creep reframing. DLC 1 gets shallowly padded enough that they can retroactively argue it represents the content of what was originally two DLCs. "We combined them into one bigger, better experience for the fans!" Season Pass holders get told their purchase still has full value. This is the CP Phantom Liberty maneuver. I find this one to be the most likely.
- "We're redirecting resources to Stalker 3." This one would come later in the cycle, probably after the first DLC ships, any of the previous angles is worked into it, commercial momentum is clearly dying, and those gay-ass phases modding tools and resources are released in are done and gone, allowing the community to keep the game on an indefinite life support instead of them. Of course it'd be framed positively as fan service: "you loved Hort of Chornobyl so much we want to give you a full sequel rather than stretch this one further!" This allows everyone to collectively soypog, hold hands and sing cumbaya as we've consumed one product and are already waiting, mouth agape, to receive the next one.
And of course no matter the excuse, the wider community will eat it up and defend it to death while the current owner, Krippa, an esports stakeholder specializing in media and monetization, will continue puppeteering GSCs corpse to his purposes, working the engoodening angle to keep the positive PR going for as long as possible.
After writing this, I came to the conclusion that I might still be a tad bit bitter about this game.
