Thread by @TristanJones94

The upcoming #AtomicHeart launch has me thinking about the issue of Russian game studios and how we ought to treat them and their products given the ongoing Russian invasion of Ukraine. A 🧵 1/24

@IGN @eurogamer @GameSpot @Polygon

This is a complicated topic and I don’t think there’s a clearly right answer, but I really haven’t seen it discussed much if at all in gaming circles. To be clear, under normal circumstances I would not want to blame or punish the citizens of a country for the actions of their

government, but Russia and Ukraine have both moved to a total war footing. Sadly, I believe that the war is most likely to continue until one side runs out of resources to sustain its war economy. In this context, and with Russian and Belarussian game studios often employing

high level officials with direct links to the Russian government, and having financial investments from the same, a portion of their income is definitely going directly into the Russian war economy, before you even get to whatever taxes they may continue to pay in Russia.

I'm also concerned that with Russia so heavily sanctioned, their ties with supposedly international game studios may give them a potential route to dodge some sanctions and launder money.

So let's look at some of these studios and their context.

The biggest example in the news today of the issues I’m bringing up is Atomic Heart by Moscow-founded developer Mundfish.

Here is one Ukrainian’s perspective on the game and developer: thegamer.com/russia-invasio…

Polygon goes into some details about just how culturally Russian the new game is in its preview here: polygon.com/23553661/atomi…

And here is an article about the developer’s financial and personnel ties to the Russian government: ain.capital/2023/01/17/ato…

You also have incidents like this within the game itself:

https://twitter.com/eywind/status/1615334349750300672

which contribute to a hostile in-game atmosphere for Ukrainians and others who have cause to directly fear Russian attacks.

Sadly of course this goes far beyond Atomic Heart and Mundfish.

Let’s look at Owlcat Studios, whose games I’m a huge fan of and whose developers seem to be genuinely lovely nerdy people. Warhammer 40k Rogue Trader is due to come out Q3 this year, which is of course a Western IP, and Owlcat certainly employs an international team.

But prior to the war they were de facto headquartered in Moscow. They’ve supposedly moved the bulk of their staff to Cyprus, a recurring trend. They also, like Mundfish, have been invested in by GEM Capital with its ties to Gazprom, Russia’s state-owned oil and gas company,

as well as Mail Ru, a Russian technology company which also has explicit ties to the Russian government. mcvuk.com/business-news/…

You also have companies like Wargaming, originally headquartered in Belarus, which runs World of Tanks, and World of Warships.

Wargaming had a major presence in Russia, but has supposedly moved all or most of its staff over to . . . Cyprus. Now, as someone who’s moved countries a couple of time, there’s a huge amount of difficultly and expense involved. The idea that all of these major studios

with large staffs have moved them all out of Russia strikes me as unlikely. Even if they did, there’s little evidence they've severed their financial links with Russia. As far as I know, no Russian company has made any formal statements against the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

Here is how Wargaming supposedly responded almost a year ago now: eurogamer.net/world-of-tanks…

I’ve seen no followup from the gaming press, no interviews with employees, no real scrutiny of what this company claims to have done, at all.

Now from a pro-Russian perspective we have this: realnoevremya.com/articles/6845-…

The Russian games economy has definitely taken a major financial hit, many high level staff have moved out of the country to Cyprus and Kazakstan among other places, and they’re seeking more Russian

government financial support. That said, the bulk of development staff does not appear to have actually moved, and it’s also clear that the companies that have left are still considered by Russia to be Russian companies, & an important part of the Russian economy.

There are even proposals for forming a sort of Russian EA to prop up the market and project soft power abroad: thegamer.com/russia-conside…

For me, at the risk of invoking Godwin’s Law, I take the perspective of an American in 1940 looking at buying a German board game.

The board game is in English, it says the company is headquartered in Switzerland. But the company was founded in Berlin, it has investments from Hitler’s government, and some members of its senior staff have direct links to prominent Nazi party members.

What would it take for me to feel comfortable buying that game from that company?

I think it would need to divest itself of those investments, fire those members of staff with government connections, and prove its genuine independence.

It could do this in part by publicly denouncing the invasions of its mother country and donating a portion of profits to supporting humanitarian efforts in the victimized country(s). It would also need to offer transparency and make staff available for interviews.

Here and now none of this has been done, and while I’m sympathetic to wanting to “keep politics out of games” or to support game developers we have a positive relationship with, I think the gaming community has really been turning a blind eye to this thorny issue.

I also feel that the gaming press has been a bit negligent here. It's also clear that our big Western publishers have a financial interest in not rocking the boat and potentially delaying or derailing projects they’ve also invested money into.

So I believe that I have a moral responsibility to attempt a general boycott of these studios and games until the Russian invasion of Ukraine is over, however much I like the artistic ideas, premises, or individual developers involved in the products.

How about you?

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