Russia is studying the creation of a national ecosystem of consoles with features equivalent to Xbox and PlayStation, following a guideline issued in March by President Vladimir Putin. The Ministry of Industry and Commerce had until last Saturday (15) to “evaluate the agenda for organizing the production of tabletop and portable consoles, as well as the creation of an Operating System and cloud infrastructure to offer games and applications to the users”.
Photo: Totte Annerbrink/Unplash / Canaltech
Since 2022, giants such as Sony and Nintendo have suspended sales of consoles, physical games and closed digital stores in Russia as a form of boycott in response to the invasion of Ukraine.
Currently, the gaming market is already one of the most profitable in the world, easily surpassing the film industry. The Russian government’s initiative would be a way to bypass the boycott and develop a local gaming industry with the potential to exploit these incomes, at least at the local level and between regions aligned with the country’s foreign policies.
Challenges in creating Russian consoles
Even on already released consoles and with extremely mature development tools, modern game development cycles range from 3 to 5 years, depending on the scope and potential problems of the project. Even if Russia manages to cover part of the hardware creation needed in record time, the platform would only begin to gain ground to be minimally sustainable in a span of about 10 years.
In addition, it is necessary to take into account that the consoles use a number of advanced technologies and hardware, obtained through global partnerships. Even the giants like AMD and NVIDIA face difficulties in creating fully local productions of their basic components that power the base of complex products such as consoles.
Finally, it would still be necessary to create an entire remote operation infrastructure in the cloud, also completely national, to power the servers, at least for game distribution, not to mention the demand for possible online components. Currently, Russia only has three main cloud gaming platforms, VK Play, MTS Fog Play and Plus Gaming, which should make the project’s viability even more difficult.
Source: 3DNews.ru
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