What justifies the sudden removal of a language from the game? Especially for a language that is in the top 10…

According to Wikipedia, Russian is the eighth most widely spoken language in the world when the number of native speakers and second-language speakers is added together. (The top 10 are English, Mandarin Chinese, Hindi, Spanish, French, Modern Standard Arabic, Bengali, Russian, Portuguese, and Urdu).

Hence, for a game as big as Starfield from Bethesda Game Studios (directed by Todd Howard…), it is only fitting that Russian should have appeared in the localization list earlier. We would like to point out that we used the past tense. According to SteamDB, on April 11, Bethesda Game Studios, Bethesda or Microsoft had a change of heart and removed the Russian language and subtitles from the game. The Internet Archive’s imprint even listed the Cyrillic language on March 29!

It might be a protesting move against the authoritarian Russian government that there will be one less language in the game, but Bethesda (or Microsoft) could have done that earlier. Still, the timing is a bit suspicious, more than a year after the war against the Ukrainians started. Of course, it could also be a cost-cutting move by Bethesda. (We have a suggestion: take Denuvo out of Ghostwire: Tokyo! A year since the game was released, and it was slipped in with the free Spider’s Thread update?) The game won’t be officially sold in Russia, but this is a way to cross the Ukrainians, many of whom also speak Russian.

There is no reasoning behind the language removal (it’s highly suspicious, are they afraid of reactions…?). And the Russians have tried like pigs on ice (“national game engine,” “Russian Electronic Arts” – we have written about both).

Source: PCGamer