Russia continues work on homegrown game console despite technology and scale issues

Ah yes, the Blyatbox. I guess we're going back to cold war era Russia where all their stuff is just worse blatantly reverse engineered copies of stuff from other countries. Makes sense, Putin for some reason has really had a hard-on for recreating cold war era Russia.

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stuff is just worse blatantly reverse engineered copies

The reason they only had reverse-engineered copies is because the bigwigs at the CPSU decided that the workers didn't need personal computers, despite the fact that all the computer research facilities in the USSR (of which there were plenty) recommended that they do.

If the USSR had thrown it's weight behind personal computing we could have had some interesting shit.

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- People don't realize that the USSR was actually ahead of the USA and Europe in certain fields they decided to put effort in...
  
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- You underestimate how affordable or accessible a computer was in the eastern block. For reference, a color tv that is "mass produced" and didn't need much expensive high tech parts would cost as much as you would earn in one year - if you manage to find one in a shop.
  
  For a computer you needed to find keyboard, drive, monitor, software and the computer itself which would be at least equally expensive to a color tv.
  
  All the chips had to be manufactured locally in the eastern block, because there was an embargo on western computer tech. RAM alone was 10x more expensive because the manufacturing process was very inefficient.
  
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- Ternary computing is some serious alt-history fodder.
  
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Going back to the cold-war era where the USSR had to manufacture and provide mostly every single consumer good for its own citizens due to economic sanctions and isolation. You can't compare luxury goods made all over the entire world for a wealthy minority, designed by experts from all other industrialized countries, against soviet-made mass-produced items which were meant to be able to be produced in as many units as possible using the least amount of resources possible. It's just different manufacturing paradigms.

The USSR was what is called a "shortage economy" as opposed to western capitalism's "surplus economy". In capitalism, an abundance of competing companies in the same field leads to overproduction of most goods in a way that some products from some brands end up on the shelves of stores and storage houses collecting dust, and companies who manufacture a lot of these non-desired products, disappear. This leads to an inefficient waste of resources and labour, since it leads to unused goods and services.

The USSR, on the other hand, had a state-planned economy in which, using predictions of the planned output of raw materials, decided what to produce with these materials. Producing 10 more drills, meant that you had to produce 10 fewer units of something else. Hence, the economy was optimized so that only as many as strictly necessary of most goods would be manufactured. Additionally, the products were design to require the least amount of labour and resources necessary to be manufactured, taking into account mostly long-life and easy repairability to prevent inefficiencies. It was the only way that the USSR could, as a less industrialized state than for example Germany or the US or Britain (which had started industrialising around one century before the USSR did), could provide goods for everyone, and for the most part it did. The quality of products may not have been as high as high-quality consumer goods in the west, but that's simply a combination of design choice to be available to cover more goods with similar amounts of raw materials and labour, of fewer experts in design and manufacturing than worldwide due to the size of the soviet block and their economical embargos.

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- On non-complex stuff, I wish some of our shit was still built to last like shortage economy stuff was. It seems like planned obsolescence creeped from a handful of products to basically everything.
  
  A lot of it is market forces and globalization — people just get the cheapest version off Amazon if they don’t know the brands — but even relatively expensive clothes, tools, charging cables, etc. break all the fucking time.
  
  This isn’t a communist vs. capitalist rant so much as an old man one. Simple products were generally better quality in the past. The cars broke down more but the tools you needed to fix them lasted fucking generations. Jeans didn’t just rip like they do now. Even things like pocket knives lasted forever if you took basic care of them. You can still find quality products but it’s increasingly impossible in some product categories.
  
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- They couldn't have been that isolated when they were directly buying and copying western designs. The first version of Tetris was programmed on what is more or less the Soviet clone of the DEC PDP-11.
  
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I would probably call it something like Нахуящик. I think it would resonate better with local audiences.

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good look to them trying to revelse engineer a modern CPU lmao

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Excited for the Blyat Boy Advance

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Guess they can't keep buying Xbox controllers fpr their drones. So they create a console to get kids to play video games and natively learn the new controller they will eventually use on the battlefield

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I hate how accurate you are. There's no other reason it would be government backed ESPECIALLY during war time where they're pissing money away and losing their soldiers left and right without be able to fill the open spots.

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- Well, the reasons are probably:
  
  wanting to develop domestic chips
  
  wanting to develop software companies
  
  wanting to push russian culture among the young population
  
  and others
  
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- Call of Duty is very literally the greatest military recruitment tool the US government has and I'm pretty sure the c-levels at Activision have been full of former state department officials for the last 15 years
  
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- From what I hear, the war spending is still pretty low, all things considered. This could just be another autarky subsidy.
  
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They could call it the Dendy 360 or something

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Doubtful, given that Dendi is Ukrainian...

But now that I think of it, he's a Russian speaking Ukranian so maybe he WOULD be their first choice...

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Soviet jump game 2 when?? 👀

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This is certainly a choice.

I feel bad for the devs they’re going to hold at gunpoint.

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I wonder if they're going to do digital or physical releases. It would probably save more money if they didn't have physical media.

Would be funny if Western games companies start getting in on it. Although I suspect that everything on it'll be mobile game quality garbage.

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can't wait for "next to last fantasy" to come out

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And Smash Bandhooter, Blyat and Jaxter, Guitar-Trompetto, Road Combater, Earthly Fight, 770 Brass Peeper, and of course, let's not forget; Trophy of Courage: Ukrainian Front.

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- The courage that inspired armies....to steal toilets.
  
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I bet they will release some rebranded chinese android console with a shitload of cracked games and call it a day.

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Tracking*

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Blyatstation is going to be a huge success, trust me.

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I guess the Kremlin thinks that it's a soft power concern (subversive Western ideas in front of our children's eyeballs), but in all seriousness, this seems way down on the list of things that I'd be worried about if I were them.

In terms of exposure to a domestic audience, consoles are closed platforms. They can probably mostly restrict creation and sale of Russian-language content that they find politically-objectionable. That's probably a lot easier and cheaper than trying to produce a new state-subsidized console.
Scale matters here. China hasn't done this. If China hasn't done it, I doubt that it's gonna go well for Russia.
This is gonna drag people off projects that they're actually gonna need more in terms of import substitution. I mean, direct military stuff aside, your whole economy is gonna have problems with lack of access to stuff from outside.
Consoles have a relatively-low gaming marketshare today, due to mobile. They're probably globally the least-important.
Of all of the gaming platforms out there, PC, console, and mobile, consoles are the least-useful in terms of non-game applications. If Russia wants to be a player in one of those, consoles would be the last I'd choose. It'd probably be easier to just ban consoles in Russia, if necessary.

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Three side remarks about China, which can be a peculiar example to compare to for Russia, maybe even any other country:

They actually banned consoles for a quite significant 15 years (2000–2015), which strongly tilted their market towards PC.

Their companies actively make PC-type gaming handhelds, and many of them are even well-established in the business ahead the current “Steam Deck” wave/bandwagon: GPD (once called GamePad Digital, first release in 2016), OneXPlayer (2020), Ayaneo (2021).

Chinese gaming companies are quite at the whim of the censorship, and occasional “crackdowns” out of the blue, and many have therefore reoriented themselves for an international audience to de-risk their business.
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The Dendy Deck is the most exciting console ever made! I am totally not being held at gunpoint in front of a window right now!

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Immediately made me think of this.

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I will believe it when I see it. Who will be making games for them, I wonder.

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They can just reskin steamdeck and sell pirated content, aint shit anyone can do to stop them.

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- Do they have the hardware for it? There's an embargo on all of the relevant hardware...
  
  They can make their own chips, but on super old equipment, so it'll run hot and poorly. So they'll be limited in what domestically produced equipment can run.
  
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Russian programmers are pretty good; don't underestimate them. A lot of them are focused on malware, mind you.

I don't expect Russia will make a console on par with a PS5, but they might make one closer to the hardware of a SNES Classic mini-console.

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- You are right, but you should remember that a lot of them fled the country to skip conscript. Moreover, games are made a very long time, 4-5 years minimum and it costs a lot of money. And to make independent platform you must create a lot of games because no one will buy it if you can't play at anything.
  
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- But what about game designers and artists? There's a good reason why eurojank exists.
  
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Rosconsole is best Russian console! Play exciting Russian video games!

• Is Drink Borscht Contest

• Vote for Putin

• Call of Russian Duty: Freed Maximum Security Prisoner Ops

• Tetris

• Federation of International Bandy Jam

• Soviet Food Line Simulator

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In orbanistan (hungary) occuppied by soviets for 40 years (but even today orban is in the pocket of putin), we have a joke: "the problem with soviet/russian microelectronics: the product does not fit through the factory gate"

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I'm genuine curious if it's any good.

Russians are kinda EE experts. If anyone's gonna resolder their GPU...

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If they create Linux-based console that further improve usability in general and add more Linux user, I'm in.

The current state of gaming store is too centralized on US. The only second notable is probably Japan, but they have too many region-locked platform.

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And they'll only use it to steal all of your data!

Wait, Russia doesn't have a big reputation for hacking and espionage, right?

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