The head of the Novosibirsk studio Cyberia Nova, Alexey Koptsev, in an interview with RBC, told how European and American sanctions affected the development of the historical action role-playing game “The Troubles.”
Image source: Cyberia Nova
According to Koptsev, the production of “Smuta” began with the support of the Internet Development Institute a year and a half before the current events. The team stored about 2 TB of data on Google Drive (historical sources, references, other information).
“No one could have imagined that the stable Google would begin to turn into a pumpkin. We were given a week to transfer the data. We organized an emergency migration to Yandex Cloud. A lot was saved, but there were still losses,” Koptsev recalled.
The developers had to “change their shoes in the air” when it comes to office applications. Google was replaced by a Russian-made package, “much inferior in convenience” to its American counterparts.
Warface (image source: Astrum Entertainment)
The Lesta Games studio (World of Tanks, World of Ships) also had to reconfigure many processes from scratch as a result of the sanctions, and Astrum Entertainment (Warface, Perfect World) took almost a year to find analogues to Western software.
In the matter of iron, the countries of Southeast Asia came to the aid of Astrum, but the cost increased and deliveries slowed down (from a month to four to six). In general, however, the studio solved all the problems “without losing quality.”
But the costs of creating a game have not increased dramatically: according to the head of Lesta Games, Malik Khatazhaev, prices are rising in direct proportion to the level of employee salaries, and “at the global level, development in Russia has become even cheaper.”
“World of Tanks” (image source: Lesta Games)
They put sanctions on the availability of Russian games outside the country. Koptsev recalls that “Troubles” was originally planned for the world market, but now “we found ourselves inside a certain closed box.”
Developers can now “only dream” about placement on Steam, and Koptsev, Khatazhaev and Astrum CEO Sergey Efremov unanimously named VK Play (and RuStore for mobile projects) as a relevant platform in the current realities.
As it became known from the presentation of projects of the Internet Development Institute that took place the day before, the release of “Troubles” is expected in February 2024 exclusively on VK Play. Iran has already invested about 500 million rubles in the development of the game.
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