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When they say “homegrown” they mean “home grown”
Gorelkin said that Russian consoles aren’t being designed only to play ports of hundreds of old, less-demanding games. He added that they should primarily serve the purpose of promoting and popularizing domestic video game products.
The fundamental problem here is that software is an example of a product that has high fixed costs, low variable costs.
For products like that, scale matters a lot, because you can spread the fixed costs over many units.
Russia just isn’t that big.
Maybe it’d work if they can find something unique that Russian video game players really badly want that other people don’t care about much, so that desire is being unmet by production elsewhere.
Honestly, foreign sanctions might be the most-helpful route to make domestic production for the domestic market viable, since I don’t know how many official Russian localizations of foreign-made games will happen as things stand, and I assume that there are a substantial number of people in Russia who are going to need a game in Russian language to play it. I mean, people might be able to do some fan translations, but…
Foreign sanctions are also, I’d think, going to make it harder to get a successful export product working for Russian developers. I don’t know to what extent it impacts them, but it can’t be helpful.
If you look at this list:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Video_games_developed_in_Russia
It’s not massive, and a lot of what’s there isn’t really top-notch stuff. There are some Russia-originating games that I like. Il-2 Sturmovik: 1946 is a world-class combat flight sim. But it’s part of a family of military simulation games that, from my past reading, benefited from a sorta unique situation. When the Soviet Union broke up, a lot of military spending got sharply cut, and a lot of military experts were suddenly looking for a job. There were a number of video game companies that picked some of them up as consultants to make military sims. That’s probably not going to show up again.
And I cannot imagine that the fallout from this conflict will improve Russian consumer spending capability over time, so it’s probably even harder to do a game oriented at the domestic market than would otherwise be the case.
I’d add Digital Combat Simulator to Il-2, it’s not just that they are great sims, they pretty much are the only sims out there besides maybe Falcon.
That said, game studios are getting out of Russia as well.
One aspect that isn’t being discussed though is that Eastern European gaming culture very heavily favours PC gaming over consoles. My guess is that it’s because hackability / crackability is valued, and people are uses to have to make do with less. That’s also why a huge percentage of the piracy scene is from Eastern Europe and Russia specifically.
Just look at how even a comparatively westernised studio like CDPR is doing with consoles. And how most of Eastern European games are hard-to-get-into, use-your-whole-keyboard titles.
I’m just saying is that Russia deciding that they will do domestic consoles is about as braindead as if Afghanistan decided to do domestic subcompact EVs. Hard to start up an industry with very little domestic demand. I feel that the idea came from a bubble of privileged rich in Moscow who are largely separated from mainstream Russian culture.
That said, game studios are getting out of Russia as well.
Yeah, I’ve noticed that, but I do wonder how much of that is “we legally moved headquarters, but subcontract back into Russia”.
Like, you listed DCS:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eagle_Dynamics
Following Tishin’s death in 2018,[14] Eagle Dynamics moved its headquarters to Switzerland, with multinational employees and contractors in Russia, Belarus, Ukraine, the United States, Canada, Germany, the United Kingdom, Italy, Spain and elsewhere.
I remember reading some articles a bit back about Rolls-Royce subcontracting British nuclear submarine software back into Belarus and Russia.
Britain’s nuclear submarine engineers use software that was designed in Russia and Belarus, in contravention of Ministry of Defence rules, The Telegraph can reveal.
The software should have been created by UK-based staff with security clearance, but its design was partially outsourced to developers in Siberia and Minsk, the capital of Belarus.
I’d kind of think that scrutiny is probably less on video games than on defense contractors doing classified work on nuclear submarines, and if it can happen in the latter case…
I suspect the foreign sanctions will indirectly prevent a healthy video games ecosystem from forming in Russia, on top of everything you’ve already cited. With these sanctions, there is even less incentive than before for Russia to crack down on (software) piracy (of foreign games). So their game devs are competing with essentially free and high quality games made by everything from indie devs to huge studios.
