He has instructed his government to consider copying Valve domestically, so essentially he wants his own handheld PC, operating system, PC and gaming platform.

In late January, Russia’s recently “re-elected” “president” took part in a discussion on the social and economic development of the Kaliningrad region and nodded to nine proposals. One was the creation of an entire digital entertainment platform, eerily similar to Gabe Newell’s company. Putin said that consideration should be given to the production of game consoles that can be used locally and on portable devices, an operating system, and the provision of games and programs to gamers via a cloud system. In other words, Steam Machine, Steam Deck, SteamOS, Steam.

This will be about the same as the National Game Engine (really, did anything happen with that?), as the deadline is June 15. It’s impossible to develop something in that time without it being stolen and then renamed (which would quickly get them busted). A Russian newspaper, Kommersant, looked into how realistic this is. The product director of Lesta Games (they run the World of Tanks clone over there) says it would take 5-10 years to create a system, and technically it would be 15 years behind. So if they were to start a handheld PC now, they would be doing what Steam Deck can do now by 2040…

Software? The Astra Linux distro was created to replace Windows, put Proton on top of it, and that would solve the problem of supporting many PC games. Okay, but how are they going to copy Steam? A lot of people have tried and not much has come of it. Anyway, a silicon factory has been built in Chernyakhovsk in Kaliningrad, so it makes sense that they are trying to boost the domestic technology sector. It is estimated that the factory will produce about 200 million silicon wafers a year, mainly so that Russia can produce its own solar cells.

But let’s face it, this is another impossible mission. In the first half of the nineties, an NES (Famicom) clone, the Dendy, proliferated there while the SNES, Mega Drive, then PS1 and N64 dominated the West. And the country’s isolation made the chances of anything worthwhile happening even slimmer.

Source: PCGamer, Kreml, Kommersant