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Russia continues work on homegrown game console despite technology and scale issues (www.tomshardware.com)

submitted 5 months ago by [email protected] to c/technology

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[–] [email protected] 15 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (1 children)

I guess the Kremlin thinks that it's a soft power concern (subversive Western ideas in front of our children's eyeballs), but in all seriousness, this seems way down on the list of things that I'd be worried about if I were them.

In terms of exposure to a domestic audience, consoles are closed platforms. They can probably mostly restrict creation and sale of Russian-language content that they find politically-objectionable. That's probably a lot easier and cheaper than trying to produce a new state-subsidized console.
Scale matters here. China hasn't done this. If China hasn't done it, I doubt that it's gonna go well for Russia.
This is gonna drag people off projects that they're actually gonna need more in terms of import substitution. I mean, direct military stuff aside, your whole economy is gonna have problems with lack of access to stuff from outside.
Consoles have a relatively-low gaming marketshare today, due to mobile. They're probably globally the least-important.
Of all of the gaming platforms out there, PC, console, and mobile, consoles are the least-useful in terms of non-game applications. If Russia wants to be a player in one of those, consoles would be the last I'd choose. It'd probably be easier to just ban consoles in Russia, if necessary.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

Three side remarks about China, which can be a peculiar example to compare to for Russia, maybe even any other country:

They actually banned consoles for a quite significant 15 years (2000–2015), which strongly tilted their market towards PC.
Their companies actively make PC-type gaming handhelds, and many of them are even well-established in the business ahead the current “Steam Deck” wave/bandwagon: GPD (once called GamePad Digital, first release in 2016), OneXPlayer (2020), Ayaneo (2021).
Chinese gaming companies are quite at the whim of the censorship, and occasional “crackdowns” out of the blue, and many have therefore reoriented themselves for an international audience to de-risk their business.