12 Years in the Zone!
Today, our shared, cozy, and still slightly crooked Chernobyl Zone turns 12.
*12 years, damn.*
Over this time, the game has changed its name twice and survived seven distinct development stages. Each stage felt completely different and raised its own generation of players, each with their own memes, legends, grudges, stories, and curses aimed at the balance and economy.
Honestly, every year here is different from the previous. One minute we’re getting an earthquake over the latest season update, then shotguns suddenly become OP, then out of nowhere we get an unexpectedly good patch - and right after that, there’s a brand-new reason for everyone to start shaking again. And there's something beautiful about that. This soup never stops boiling or cools down, just like that legendary perpetual soup in Bangkok.
We actually have a lot in common with that soup. For years, we’ve been adding new ingredients on top without cleaning the pot or throwing out the old contents. On one hand, this undeniably gave the game a unique, one-of-a-kind flavor. On the other hand, for most of its existence, development has been a creative chaos without a single direction, vision, or plan.
Many veteran players often say the game itself doesn't know what it wants to be. And the main catch is that what STALZONE might want to become simply doesn't exist in game dev. Any attempt to limit it into the familiar categories of an extraction shooter, MMO shooter, or MMORPG risks losing that very identity that was born from countless trial and error, fixing mistakes, solving old problems, and creating new ones.
Maybe it’s not even a bad thing that we still can’t give a definitive answer to what this game wants to be. It’s like asking a person: "Who are you?" Every year, the answer will be different.
The game is shaped by both external and internal factors: frustrations and wishes of the players, the growing experience of veteran devs, fresh ideas from the new ones, tech upgrades, and opportunities for mechanics we never even considered before.
But as fun as it is to work in creative chaos, the painful realization that we can't keep living like this has been building up for a long time. We needed a clear development plan and vision for at least a year or two ahead.
After a long preparation and a transition period, this summer EXBO has finally transformed from an organizational structure resembling a market bazaar to a more meaningful division into dedicated workstreams. Now, separate teams are responsible for different areas of the game, staffed with specialists from all the key development disciplines, so they can properly guide their part of the game from idea to execution.
No more running around the office with your hand out, begging for time and resources and crowding in line, but rather calmly doing your job and taking responsibility for it.
There will still be lines, of course, we’re far from full team autonomy, and some dev departments still function as internal services supporting multiple workstreams, remaining a bottleneck in places. But now it’s at least not a chaotic crowd around a single campfire, but a more organized system where it’s clear who is responsible for what, where the bottlenecks are, and what needs to be scaled up next.
We’ve already buzzed your ears with this on the streams: onboarding, core, live-service, endgame, and monetization are now developed by partially autonomous teams. They can move the game forward more evenly, without elbowing each other fighting over resources. Sure, there are still bottlenecks and not all dev departments are organized into streams yet, but that will be sorted out over time.
Our main goal now is to eliminate bottlenecks, increase autonomy, and improve long-term planning for at least a year ahead so it doesn't crumble under spontaneous decisions and ambitions.
So yeah, after 12 years in game dev, we’ve finally arrived at these groundbreaking solutions. Took us long enough - but hey, the important thing is we got there. Now wish us a happy birthday!
By the end of this year, you will definitely feel the changes. Updates will become more meaningful, and we’re going to focus on the game's pain points that everyone is already sick and tired of.
We want the Zone to keep changing, keep evolving, and leaving no one indifferent.
Thank you to everyone who stays with us. Everyone writing posts. Everyone just playing. Everyone watching streams and our office videos. To everyone who genuinely wants to see the game get better and patiently keeps sharing their feedback with us developers, again and again, even when we don’t get it the first time.
Happy birthday to all of us!
*With love,*
*ZIV*