Vladimir Putin instructed the government to "consider organizing" the production of portable gaming devices and consoles in Russia. The parliamentarians are optimistic. However, market participants believe that it is impossible to create a device that is competitive with Western ones.
GS Gamekit
According to the telegram channel "Sad Cyberpunk", lawmakers do not see a big problem in launching the production of Russian video game consoles. In their opinion, everything is quite simple.
"The optimal story is cloud gaming. There are certain options. VK can make a kind of console out of its smart speaker “Marusya”, connect a joystick, connect VK Play there. Yandex has similar competencies. I think that Beber will be able to implement this. I think that the console will have its own. It will be different, but the story through cloud gaming will be very effective. The main thing is to have high—speed Internet," said Anton Gorelkin, deputy of the State Duma and Chairman of the Board of the Regional Public Center for Internet Technologies.
The interlocutors of the Kommersant newspaper look at the situation differently. For example, one of them told reporters that it would take about 10 years and up to 10 billion rubles to create a system from scratch.
The problem is that even in the case of such a period and such large-scale investments, the resulting device is likely to still lag significantly behind its Western counterparts.
According to Anton Fomin, head of retail projects at Fplus, no one in the country has expertise in the production of PlayStation and Xbox-level consoles.
A realistic scenario is the release of computers in a special case as OEM solutions in the spirit of Steam Deck," he notes.
Against this background, it is not surprising that other interlocutors of the publication consider close work with foreign (primarily Chinese) partners as a working option.
"The best thing that can be done is to conduct deep integration with friendly countries that have access to modern technologies," Andrei Lysak, product director of the World of Tanks, told our colleagues.
One of Kommersant's sources among electronics manufacturers said that production could be entrusted to "a large holding company involved in the gaming industry, for example, VK."
As for the collector, GS Group, which is currently working on set-top boxes for Sberbank, can act in his role.
By the way, GS Group has previously been engaged in the production of game consoles. In 2016, she launched the GS Gamekit Android-based device (on the cover).