Since the start of the war in Ukraine in 2022, Russia has seen many international companies withdraw from its market. Among them, electronics and video game giants like Sony and Microsoft, as well as numerous development studios, which have stopped distributing their consoles and games. Faced with this exodus, the Kremlin reacted in January 2024: Vladimir Putin publicly asked national companies to develop game consoles to compete with the PS5 and Xbox Series Russian Valley”, was responsible for laying the technical foundations of this project. But early reports indicate a dismal failure.
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game over.
To understand this failure, we must return to the conditions in which this project was born. Since international sanctions, Russia has been cut off from access to advanced semiconductors, essential for the manufacture of modern consoles. These technological restrictions, combined with increasing isolation, have severely penalized local innovation capacities. Additionally, the Skolkovo Foundation, meant to catalyze Russia's tech ecosystem, lacks sufficient expertise in the video game industry. Initially designed to encourage research in artificial intelligence and biotechnology, it was never intended to develop electronic leisure equipment. And let's not forget that consoles are only gaming platforms, studios still need to design titles to be able to benefit from them…
According to Habr.com's sources, two consoles were in development: a cloud-gaming model called “MTS” which would have been marketed at around $45, and a model which would have been equivalent to the PS5, built around a processor called “Elbrus”. However, the prototypes presented so far show major technical delays and cannot compete with current generation consoles.
This setback has implications far beyond the video game industry. For Vladimir Putin, the initiative was as much a symbolic as an economic response to Western sanctions. Showing that Russia could produce local alternatives to Xbox and PS5 was part of a desire to demonstrate technological sovereignty. But the failure of these consoles illustrates on the contrary the fragility of the Russian economy in the face of international isolation. In economic terms, this failed project represents considerable waste. According to several sources, initial investments in the project were estimated at several hundred million rubles. A sum that could have been dedicated to technological sectors less dependent on Western imports.
Russian players, for their part, find themselves in an increasingly uncomfortable position. Deprived of large international gaming ecosystems, they must either turn to parallel markets that are often expensive (some titles are traded secretly for several hundred dollars) or adopt local alternatives that are well below global standards.
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