Games

you have to start by creating a witcher 1 before you can dream

I mean, there are good Russian games out there (at least in my opinion).

Off-the-cuff, Il-2 Sturmovik is one of the better flight sims, though the 1946 game, while greatly-extended and possessing a real dynamic campaign, is elderly. I brought it up a while back, because I was concerned about the fact that if someone has the game installed and Steam can push out updates to the thing, then it's basically a non-isolated binary blob that can execute with user permission on many people's computers; if the Russian government requires the publisher to push out updates to people in the West, that's a computer security hole via which one can get access to people's computers.

Digression:

I remember, at one point, playing through a bunch of good war sims, and realizing that almost all of them were out of the Warsaw Pact, and being a little discouraged by that, like...can't we create any solid war sims in the US?

I didn't understand why until I watched a video by the Military History Visualized guy, an Austrian guy who does military history content. He went and interviewed some people...I think it was mostly talking about the Ukrainian defense industry. It was actually kinda sad, I guess. Turns out that what happened is that after the Soviet Union broke up, a lot of people in the defense industry were out of a job. What do you do if you have a background in military industry and suddenly demand falls off a cliff? Well, not a lot of options out there...but one thing that did exist was being a consultant on military sim video games. That meant that for a window in time, it was possible for video game developers to get really knowledgeable people to consult with them on military simulations, so they had the best military sims.

checks YouTube

Yeah, here's the bit I was thinking of. It's even specifically talking about Il-2 Sturmovik having a bunch of high-level engineers from aircraft design firms in their credits.

https://youtu.be/XbpxL5sKzyE?t=1208

But, getting back to the discussion here, normally if you're creating a game, you're trying to make a lot of money. The Russian government doesn't care about that on subsidized cultural works. They're trying to exert soft power, to insert desired narratives into cultural content that people are consuming. I'm not sure that the most-effective-way to do that is to try to make a new game in the AAA class. They don't need to make money on the vehicle; they want to get content in front of people's eyeballs. If I were in the Kremlin and assigned to do that, I'd take popular stuff, buy the rights, make it free, and then stick free DLC with the political narratives that they want to promote on the game.

It sounds like this thing is aimed at domestic audiences, but especially if they wanted to aim at foreign audiences, hell, doesn't even need to be a Russian-developed game. It's not illegal for a game publisher in the US to accept subsidized content from the Russian government. I'm sure that some publisher would accept.

And The Witcher 1 kinda sucks to play today (imo)