The Russians are trying to make the public believe that players are being recruited for the war in Ukraine and are calling for a boycott. 

404 Media reported that journalists have obtained a video, allegedly from Wired, showing that GSC Game World’s game is helping the Ukrainian government mobilize by identifying eligible residents using nonstop data mining technology. So our IP address, name, device and location are enough? A funding agreement has allegedly been reached between the developers and the Ukrainian state, and they are asking the public to boycott the game or use a VPN. 

Of course, none of this is true… the same source of this is the same people who ran the Matryoshka and Doppelganger campaigns. Anti-Ukrainian trolls posing as Western media to spread misinformation. They create an avalanche of nonsense: for example, a fake Deutsche Welle story about a Ukrainian artist trying to topple the Eiffel Tower, another about a Ukrainian looter trying to rob the catacombs in Paris, and countless alleged pictures of anti-Ukrainian graffiti in Western cities. These are sent to journalists for “verification” while the fake videos are circulated on social media (e.g. Telegram), suffocating media outlets that do not simply ignore the fake stories in their refutation work, while they spread like wildfire anyway. 

S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2: Heart of Chornobyl is also extremely popular in Russia, and Russian audiences were eagerly awaiting it before they went to war with Ukraine. GSC Game World decided (while moving their headquarters to Prague) not to make a Russian localization of the game. This upset them, so it’s no wonder that someone leaked the console ports of the first three S.T.A.L.K.E.R. games, which had not been announced at the time. 

Meanwhile, Nvidia has launched another contest on Twitter for a unique, one-of-a-kind GeForce RTX 4090 based on the game. You can enter by liking the tweet and replying with #RTXOn. Someone might win! 

Source: PCGamer