Gorelkin said that Russian consoles aren't being designed only to play ports of hundreds of old, less-demanding games. He added that they should primarily serve the purpose of promoting and popularizing domestic video game products.
The fundamental problem here is that software is an example of a product that has high fixed costs, low variable costs.
For products like that, scale matters a lot, because you can spread the fixed costs over many units.
Russia just isn't that big.
Maybe it'd work if they can find something unique that Russian video game players really badly want that other people don't care about much, so that desire is being unmet by production elsewhere.
Honestly, foreign sanctions might be the most-helpful route to make domestic production for the domestic market viable, since I don't know how many official Russian localizations of foreign-made games will happen as things stand, and I assume that there are a substantial number of people in Russia who are going to need a game in Russian language to play it. I mean, people might be able to do some fan translations, but...
Foreign sanctions are also, I'd think, going to make it harder to get a successful export product working for Russian developers. I don't know to what extent it impacts them, but it can't be helpful.
If you look at this list:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Video_games_developed_in_Russia
It's not massive, and a lot of what's there isn't really top-notch stuff. There are some Russia-originating games that I like. Il-2 Sturmovik: 1946 is a world-class combat flight sim. But it's part of a family of military simulation games that, from my past reading, benefited from a sorta unique situation. When the Soviet Union broke up, a lot of military spending got sharply cut, and a lot of military experts were suddenly looking for a job. There were a number of video game companies that picked some of them up as consultants to make military sims. That's probably not going to show up again.
And I cannot imagine that the fallout from this conflict will improve Russian consumer spending capability over time, so it's probably even harder to do a game oriented at the domestic market than would otherwise be the case.
