Putin Orders Russian Tech Companies To Somehow Make Competitive Game Console In 3 Months
from the are-you-putin-me-on? dept
Back when Vladimir Putin launched his aggressive war on Ukraine, even before western government sanctions began rolling out, the video game industry started its own mini warfront on Russia. Companies began suspending sales in Russia entirely and otherwise disallowing Russian citizens to participate in global gaming culture. Groups like Itch.io began selling game bundles with proceeds going to groups that provide medical services to the people in Ukraine. And because of this and other sanctions, Russia voiced plans to essentially legalize copyright infringement on products from “unfriendly” countries.
Obviously when it comes to this war that has now spanned over two years, the gaming industry’s efforts are not exactly the most important aspect of the fight. Still, the whole point of a coordinated and multi-pronged response to all of this is to make life as uncomfortable as possible for the citizens of Russia in order to get them to pressure Putin to end the war. Or perhaps oust Putin entirely one way or another. And it sure seems like that pressure might be starting when it comes to gaming, as Putin has issued a hilarious edict to Russian tech companies to produce gaming consoles on par with PlayStation 5s and Xbox consoles by June. As in, June of this year.
Per a report from the Russian newspaper Kommersant, the order was handed down from the Kremlin to “consider the issue of organizing the production of stationary and portable game consoles and game consoles.” Kommersant’s sources tell the nationally distributed Russian paper that the VK Group, a major Russian tech company behind the similarly named social media service VK, will be largely responsible for the project. The production of consoles will be handled by the GS Group, which was previously known as General Satellite and is the single largest Russian developer of set-top boxes.
As part of the order from the Russian government on March 25, the VK and GS Groups will be responsible for producing both home and portable consoles for Russian consumers by June 15, 2024. The order has only grown taller. This move isn’t Russia’s first in the video game industry—the country tried to “penetrate” gaming communities last year, and considered creating its own game engine the year before that. But it does mark a remarkable shift since the majority of the games industry cut off relations with the country amidst its invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Russia’s government is now trying to effectively kick off its own games industry, likely to offset the financial sting of those sanctions.
Now, look, Putin is 71 and that makes him one of the “olds” and I know the olds sometimes have trouble understanding just what is involved in pulling off some of the technical marvels we have in modern times. But even he must realize that the idea that Russia is going to, from scratch mind you, develop a AAA console on par with current generation Sony and Microsoft products is simply not going to happen. The idea of seeing something ship out of these Russian tech companies in three months that is anything other than a slightly molding potato with a poorly drawn illustration of Microsoft’s Clippy on it is fantasy. Sony announced the PS5 in April of 2019, meaning development started well before that, and released it for purchase in November of 2020. That’s a year and a half from announcement to release, roughly six times the timeline that Putin is looking for. Good fucking luck.
Oh, and that’s not all. Putin’s order also demands that these companies make these consoles ship with an operating system and backend that makes them playable from the cloud. And here I thought Google was crazy with its promises for Stadia! If you’re worried that those in Russia that actually know how all of this works are taking any of this seriously, fear not.
Per the Kommersant, analysts are already saying that “there is no competence to produce their own PlayStation and Xbox consoles, and creating such a system from scratch will take up to ten years.”
Which leaves us two potential outcomes. Either Putin walks this back and sets a more reasonable expectation for all of this, or several Russian folks are going to become very familiar with the term defenestration.
But what isn’t going to happen is the appearance of a AAA Russian console in three months.
Filed Under: gaming console, russia, vladimir putin
Comments on “Putin Orders Russian Tech Companies To Somehow Make Competitive Game Console In 3 Months”
Even Iran took 2-ish years or so and their attempt at a console was laughably bad.
Yes, IRAN.
And that was during the Wii era.
Maybe Putin should stick to clandestine funding of game studios, eh?
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Trumpublican traitors are opening Game Studios now?
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That was a reference to the alleged funding of Russia’s most successfully-funded game, Atomic Heart.
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I still massively prefer Shadow Hearts. Just sayin’.
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Here’s hoping that Penny Blood doesn’t turn out to be an overhyped mess.
But the fact that the dev team is dedicating resources to make a roguelike up front does not fill me with confidence.
Which leaves us two potential outcomes. Either Putin walks this back and sets a more reasonable expectation for all of this, or several Russian folks are going to become very familiar with the term defenestration.
Or option 3: A bunch of xbox and/or playstation consoles get their guts ripped out and put into new cases, with a new name slapped on the box and assurances that they are definitely not xboxes or playstations with a different coat of paint.
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“It has Sony guts!”
I’m not sure Russia could make a console from scratch in two months that could compete with the PS1, never mind the PS5.
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That was the secret of the SNES.
Soviet Nintendo Entertainment System
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I believe they actually called that the Де́нди (Dendy).
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What something is called and what it actually is can be two completely different things, you know.
Per a report from the Russian newspaper Kommersant, the order was handed down from the Kremlin to “consider the issue of organizing the production of stationary and portable game consoles and game consoles.”
In what world does “consider the issue of organizing the production of” equate to “provide me a functional console that can compete with the xbox and playstation” ?
Its just a task force being given a task to look into what needs to be done to do it, and they report back in 3 months…
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You apparently stopped reading after the first sentence of the quoted section.
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What you reading for?
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I didnt… I even looked at the actual source, provided by kommersant. http://kremlin.ru/acts/assignments/orders/73743
All it says is look into how to do it. That they have companies in mind for specific parts of it if they were to do it doesn’t mean the manufacturing is expected to be done in 3 months… Its just a research project. There is no official order to manufacture it immediately anywhere.
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It seems you did, because it says this a bit further down in the text snippet:
“Consider the issue” is code for “do it”.
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They can certainly “be responsible for” an outlined goal as of that date. I have definitely had jobs where I was told I would be taking on new responsibilities by a certain date. Sometimes it was on that date, sometimes it was sooner, but they were responsibilities I then had to work towards meeting for the next year or two.
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Yes, it is well known that authoritarian dictators operate under the exact same lax expectations as corporate workgroups when it comes to interpreting orders from above.
All those defenestrations in Russia were actually just trust falls! Broken kneecaps are just the side effects of ice breakers and team building exercises! Remember to do proper self care and take breaks in your artic prison colony cell!
Never mind make a triple A console and game… who in Russia is going to even remotely play it over the several hundred cracked Minecraft servers localized to Russia? Or the government-sanctioned methods of pirating other triple A games whose publishers and developers began boycotting the country since early 2022?
Putin’s going to have to look at far worse problems than which window to throw out the hypothetical console developers from. This game console thing is a threadbare distraction.
Oh! you want a console of Triple-A quality! My bad, I totally misunderstood. Now what am I going to do with a shipping crate of batteries and all these Nintendos?
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Setting the hardware aside, what about making the games? A modern AAA game takes well over a decade, and even smaller projects can take several years. And that’s without the cronyism and corruption that plague so many Russian industries
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The last AAA game from Russia (I can think of) was “The Day Before”, it should give a preview of the Russia power when developing an ~asset flip~ AAA video game.
Meanwhile, Ukraine is still working on S.T.A.L.K.E.R 2…
So he’s ordering the creation of the Dendy 2, in other words.
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He looked at the shitshow that was The Day Before and thought that was a great business model for making a game. But to be fair The Day Before was led by a pair of Russian brothers…
Watch them import a cheap AliExpress Linux emulation box, add a spyware riddled OS and claim it as a triumph of the Putin regime because it can play chugging versions of PS2 emulators.
Lets be real here. It would be fairly easy to knock out an FPGA based board that would be Super Nintendo clone (able to run clone Super Nintendo games carts). You would likely needed 8+ weeks of time to make the boards (assuming you can’t find any designs already existing). But FPGA designs (reverse engineered by hobbyists) are probably fairly common.
And I think SNES games looked better than Clippy.
If I recall correctly the PlayStation 5 is a variant of AMD’s Zen 2 Architecture. Unless Russia is still able to get modern x86’s, they are not going to be building a comparable board any time soon. Best they be happy with their snes emulators.
Well…
Someone will ship overpriced Chinese Android boxes and get richer. Not from those sales, but from government money.
And that’s just best case scenario.
“But what isn’t going to happen is the appearance of a AAA Russian console in three months.”
Unless he demands the Russian Game Console makers simply steal an Xbox and put a Russian label on it. 🙂
well not that shocked
If you are allowed to ignore copyright and patent issues its not so difficult to reverse engineer/copy something that was already invented. Though 3 months is pushing it, I think they could do it in a year.
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It would be technically possible to build a machine that plays pirated Xbox or PS5 or Switch games. But anybody willing to put themselves on MS’s/Sony’s/Nintendo’s/various publishers’ shit list like that isn’t planning on staying in the business if/when the sanctions are lifted.
Pepsi repeat?
I’m looking forward to, once Russia loses this war and the sanctions are lifted, Microsoft temporarily becoming a naval superpower in exchange for gaming consoles.
For those who don’t know: In 1989 Pepsi traded the collapsing USSR a bunch of soda for a bunch of warships and submarines making it, at least temporarily, the 6th largest navy in the world.
Can’t wait for the new DendyBox and DendyStation
That might actually be possible. After all, Microsoft only put some parts into a breeze block, and look at the result now.
Or option C – they do what they’ve done before, and just knock off the existing consoles outright(probably Made in China) and have a X-Boxski with the serial numbers filed off on the shelves in time not to end up in the gulag
Five bucks says the analysts who say this can’t be done in three months come down with mysterious cases of death, and the timeline for a Russian console will always have had an end date sometime in 2034.
Doesn’t matter. They could spray paint an empty cardboard box black for all the difference it makes. All the people who could play it are too busy dying in Ukraine.
New doctrine
“Enshittifcation” describes the degrading and eventual death of online services caused by greed. I think there’s a term asking to be born here where dictatorial hubris kills an idea as it’s being born or during its conception.
How about Putinization?
Oooh. We’re going to see a resurgence of Soviet-style Russian consumer tech. This will be an absolute riot.
All Putindo consoles will come bundled with a free kinect that sends data directly to the FSB.
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That wouldn’t surprise me. Microsoft already do that with Kinect, as does Meta with Portal.
In Soviet Russia, the hovernment tells companies when to launch products.