In the Russian-speaking gaming industry, the news about VK‘s plans to develop a new game engine was met with restraint. The general skepticism was publicly expressed by Sergey Orlovsky, the founder of the Nival studio, part of the intellectual rights and assets of which today belongs to VK.
Sergey Orlovsky
“And what kind of game engine is VK going to develop for three years?”, Sergey asked himself on his personal Facebook page.
– “Take the Silent Storm engine, or HoMM 5, or Allods Online, or Skyforge, comb your hair in six months and — voila! Moreover, it’s the same engine.”
In the comments, many gaming top managers agreed with him. Some of them did not even exclude the corruption component.
For example, the co-founder of Hypernova Games, Alexander Filatov, suggested that “someone decided to wash the “stupid” money well for as long as 3 years. Obviously, the engine is already wrapped in wrappers.”
Anton Agranovsky, founder and president of Agranovsky IT, has a similar opinion: “Everyone leaves there. Officials come. Then — only hardcore, only sawed.”
Skepticism, as follows from the above quotes, is due to the possible presence of a large legacy of VK products owned by the company (unless, of course, they were sold to Alexander Chachava along with MY.GAMES), and VK’s willingness to work with the support of government agencies.
Recall that last Saturday the Kommersant newspaper reported that VK will start developing a game engine in January 2023. The company intends to develop it by 2025. This should take 2.8 billion rubles of extra-budgetary funds.
The data source is a document that VK provided to one of the organizations supervised by the Ministry of Digital Development (Mincifra). Why this was done, if the company plans to create an engine at its own expense, is not reported.
According to leaked in According to the data, the engine will be open source. However, a commercial version of the solution will be released first. According to VK’s idea, the sales of the latter will just finance the creation of a free version.
There is, by the way, confusion. It is unclear how much money is still going to be used to develop an open version of the engine, if sales of the commercial version have not yet begun. Plus, if the engine has a closed commercial version planned, then it can hardly be called an open source solution.
The publication is also confident that VK intends to sell the engine to Rostec (possibly by subscription).
For the first time, the issue of developing a Russian game engine was raised at a closed meeting of the presidential administration with representatives of the gaming industry back in May of this year. Then it was announced that domestic developers are heavily dependent on Western tools.
Since June, various schemes for financing the engine have been offered:
- at first, the possibility of financing through the grant program of the Russian Foundation for the Development of Information Technologies (RFRIT) was discussed;
- Then Rostec offered to transfer the Roskominvest fund to him to allocate funds for the engine;
- In September, VK, together with Rostec, requested from the Ministry of Finance an amount of 3 billion rubles as a subsidy for the creation of a domestic solution for the development of video games.
As a result, in October it became known that the Ministry of Finance is not ready to allocate any funds for the engine and hopes that there will be private sources of investment.