Russia is considering its own game engine

At a time when developers are massively moving from their proprietary technologies to licensed engines, wants Russia to finance the development of its own engine. It will be created by Russian developers and provided to Russian developers for free.

According to Kommersant’s sources, a number of key Russian studios will be involved in the dialogue on developing their own engine, including the vice president of the VKontakte social network, the Russian analogue of the American Facebook. The first meeting was confirmed by the Russian Ministry of Digitalization, but it’s a matter of time. Implementation of a game engine takes a lot of time and requires a lot of specialists.

If Russian developers start preparing their own engine, the Russian government should be ready “spend billions of rubles over many years”, another source claims. Experts point out that, despite this, risky investment. The engine must be supported by graphics card manufacturers, which is also an area entirely controlled by US companies, as well as licensed engines. At the same time Nvidia, AMD and Intel a few months ago joined the boycott of Russia over the invasion of Ukraine.

The idea for a national game engine stems from fears of further sanctions that could prevent Russian developers from gaining access to technologies such as Epic Games’ Unreal Engine and Unity. The problem is that Unreal Engine 5 is a very advanced engine that makes the work of developers easier thanks to a rich library of assets that a Russian engine would not have.