PC Gamer brings word of a series of recently approved Russian economic orders from the Kremlin. Amid talk of airport and museum funding, ocean shippin

Largely cut off from Western games, Russia looks into a homegrown game console

submited by

Style Pass

2024-04-01 23:30:05

PC Gamer brings word of a series of recently approved Russian economic orders from the Kremlin. Amid talk of airport and museum funding, ocean shipping, and road construction is the somewhat bewildering instruction for the government to (machine translation):

consider the issue of organizing the production of stationary and portable game consoles and game consoles, as well as the creation of an operating system and a cloud system for delivering games and programs to users

Gaming technology isn't a completely new area of focus for the Russian government. In 2022, the Ministry of Digital Development reportedly started discussing the possibility of creating a homegrown domestic Russian game engine. But building an entire gaming platform from scratch would be an even bigger undertaking.

To be fair, building your own game console today is a bit easier than it would have been in a different era. Open source platforms like Android can provide a good starting point for a bespoke gaming operating system (it worked for Ouya, kind of), while off-the-shelf, system-on-a-chip solutions can save a lot of the hardware engineering work needed to develop a new console.