Russia fears being cut off from Unity or Unreal Engine in the wake of sanctions imposed for the attack on Ukraine. Thus, the country is looking to develop its own graphics engine, financing developers of such technologies.
As reported by the Kommersant daily, it is mainly talking about the involvement of VK, the company behind Russia’s largest social network. Funding would come from the Russian Information Technology Development Foundation.
The reporting source itself mentions the problems ahead of such an approach. First of all, the most popular solutions on the market – the aforementioned Unity and Unreal – have been developed for decades. The second is that adjustments to graphics card drivers would likely be needed, but their producers have also already withdrawn from Russia.
Nevertheless, the Ministry of Digitization is supposed to be “talking” with interested parties. It would not do without a state subsidy, which might be as high as several hundred million rubles.
This would be only the beginning, however, according to one Kommersant interlocutor. A more important thing would be precisely the long-term support already in place after the premiere.
“Again, this raises a very important point that the developers of such projects do not take into account – just how many programmers will be willing to specialize in new tools? For example, the value of developers on Unreal Engine in the market is high, because there are many projects on it,” said Sergey Matusevich of Artezio.
