Over on The Reticule I recently published an article looking at Russian Games Development which was based on conversations with a bunch of people directly involved in developing games in Russia. Here I will be publishing the conversations that led to the article. First up is Aleksey ‘The LxR’ Luchin from Ice-Pick Lodge.

These are all Aleksey’s words

First off, let me note, that I’m not exactly into analyzing the gaming industry or the market, and there are just some thoughts and conclusions I made, based on my experience in the Russian game development industry. The industry here is rather young compared to the ones in Europe and America, and thus, while we don’t produce many quality or AAA titles, there are some advantages to this situation. Since the market is rapidly developing and due to the fact, that doing business in Russian is different in its paradigm, the work patterns and traditions, that the Western industry has accepted and follows, are still forming here. This fact lessens the control over the development process, and leads to developers being able to experiment with the game more. Also, there are many small start-up studios that appear in the industry every day. All-in-all, I’d say the Russian market is a distorted reflection of the good old days when game development wasn’t an industry, and all there was were a lot of small “basement” studios that made games for the fun of it, for themselves. The obvious drawback here is that the quality of games that come from Russian is in general worse than abroad – the games suffer from bugs, strange design decisions, often hard and requiring skill to beat the game and patience to look through the flaws to see a gem. This transitional stage, when the market is beginning to get investments, but still hasn’t formed strict rules is the most fertile soil for new ideas and unusual games, the fresh blood, that the more hardcore part of gamers has been screaming for. Hopefully, this soil will become the foundation of the gaming Renaissance, that Nikolay and I have been talking in our RockPaperShotgun interview.

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