EXBO has renamed STALCRAFT: X to STALZONE, and the studio said the move came after years of trademark trouble and a name that no longer matched the game’s direction.
The announcement came from ZIV, EXBO’s CEO, who traced the title back to the project’s earliest days and said the team eventually ran into a wall when it tried to protect the brand. The company said Russia’s intellectual property office rejected the trademark because STALCRAFT was too close to StarCraft, and the dispute carried on through 2022 and into April 2026. EXBO also said similar problems followed the game into Europe and the United States.
Beyond the legal side, the studio said the old name had started to work against the game. STALZONE is meant to reflect a project that has moved far past its Minecraft mod roots and now sits in a very different lane, with extraction-shooter combat, MMO systems, and a setting built around the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone. EXBO also said the CRAFT part of the title kept setting the wrong expectations for new players.
The rename is part of a broader internal reset as well. EXBO said it has reorganized development so several parts of the game can move forward at once, including onboarding, core gameplay, season events, and endgame content. The studio also said a new lighting system is on the way and that more changes are planned across the rest of the year. To mark the switch, EXBO shared the promo code STALZONE for a reward and directed players who run into trouble to EXBO support. The message ended with one more clear sign that the change is live: the servers are open.
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Source: Steam
