It's been more than two years since major players in the international gaming industry banded together to largely cut off the Russian market in response to a request from beleaguered Ukraine. Relative isolation has clearly forced Vladimir Putin's government to consider the homegrown gaming hardware and software that defined Cold War gaming behind the Iron Curtain.
PC Gamer reports on a series of recently approved Russian economic orders from the Kremlin. Amid talk of funding for airports and museums, maritime transport and road building, there are some rather perplexing instructions for the government (machine translation).
Consider the problems of organizing the production of stationary and portable game consoles and game consoles, as well as the creation of operating systems and cloud systems for delivering games and programs to users
Oh, is that all?
large scale business
Gaming technology is not an entirely new area of focus for the Russian government. The Ministry of Digital Development has reportedly started discussions on the possibility of developing a domestic Russian game engine in 2022. But building an entire gaming platform from scratch is an even bigger undertaking.
To be fair, building your own game console today is a little easier than it was in a different era. While open source platforms like Android can provide a good starting point for a bespoke gaming operating system (which worked well for Ouya), off-the-shelf system-on-chip solutions can save significant hardware engineering costs. Masu. The work required to develop a new console.
But even if these issues were “solved,” the Russian government would still need to build another scaffold to support a robust gaming platform. Creating features like payment processing, game downloads, online play, moderation, and quality control is no easy task, even for large conglomerates like Microsoft and Valve. That's before bringing in the developers who need to create actual games for this new platform.
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Anton Fomin, head of retail projects at mobile phone company Fplus, told the Russian-language newspaper Kommersant: “No one in Russia has the expertise to independently manufacture consoles at the level of PlayStation or Xbox.” According to reports). machine translation). Anonymous expert sources also told Kommersant that it would take Russia five to 10 years to build a complete system and that it would “only get a gaming platform that lags behind existing foreign solutions in terms of parameters.” But it will cost between 5 billion and 10 billion rubles ($54 million to $108 million).” By 10 to 15 years. ”
The fact that Russia is considering this type of move could reflect the broader state of the country's gaming industry. A 2023 study found that the majority of Russian gamers are resorting to piracy for game modification as legal access to foreign games declines. Russian job data from last year suggests that domestic game development has shrunk by up to 40 percent since the start of the Ukraine war. However, this is not the first time Russia has been forced to launch its own gaming industry. During the waning years of the Cold War, Soviet engineers cut off from the Western gaming market created hundreds of amateur computer games, including a variety of bizarre copycat arcade machines and some surprising activist-themed games.If the era of Russian games could produce something like Tetrisperhaps the idea of a new Russian gaming platform is not completely ridiculous.
The Russian government has until June 15 to make recommendations on the feasibility of a domestic game console production plan.
