Ah yes, the Blyatbox. I guess we’re going back to cold war era Russia where all their stuff is just worse blatantly reverse engineered copies of stuff from other countries. Makes sense, Putin for some reason has really had a hard-on for recreating cold war era Russia.
stuff is just worse blatantly reverse engineered copies
The reason they only had reverse-engineered copies is because the bigwigs at the CPSU decided that the workers didn’t need personal computers, despite the fact that all the computer research facilities in the USSR (of which there were plenty) recommended that they do.
If the USSR had thrown it’s weight behind personal computing we could have had some interesting shit.
People don’t realize that the USSR was actually ahead of the USA and Europe in certain fields they decided to put effort in…
Sure, when you can force the workforce to do a thing, that thing tends to get done. But they’ll probably do it slower than if they chose to do it. So other things will suffer if they force a certain initiative.
And that’s what we saw in the USSR. Certain initiatives progressed well (space program, nuclear program, etc), while others suffered (food production, basic manufacturing, etc).
It’s not just that… thanks to the USSR we have technologies that wouldn’t have even existed if it was left up to the capitalists. Such as synthetic diamonds and… you know - anything and everything to do with space.
You underestimate how affordable or accessible a computer was in the eastern block. For reference, a color tv that is “mass produced” and didn’t need much expensive high tech parts would cost as much as you would earn in one year - if you manage to find one in a shop.
For a computer you needed to find keyboard, drive, monitor, software and the computer itself which would be at least equally expensive to a color tv.
All the chips had to be manufactured locally in the eastern block, because there was an embargo on western computer tech. RAM alone was 10x more expensive because the manufacturing process was very inefficient.
Going back to the cold-war era where the USSR had to manufacture and provide mostly every single consumer good for its own citizens due to economic sanctions and isolation. You can’t compare luxury goods made all over the entire world for a wealthy minority, designed by experts from all other industrialized countries, against soviet-made mass-produced items which were meant to be able to be produced in as many units as possible using the least amount of resources possible. It’s just different manufacturing paradigms.
The USSR was what is called a “shortage economy” as opposed to western capitalism’s “surplus economy”. In capitalism, an abundance of competing companies in the same field leads to overproduction of most goods in a way that some products from some brands end up on the shelves of stores and storage houses collecting dust, and companies who manufacture a lot of these non-desired products, disappear. This leads to an inefficient waste of resources and labour, since it leads to unused goods and services.
The USSR, on the other hand, had a state-planned economy in which, using predictions of the planned output of raw materials, decided what to produce with these materials. Producing 10 more drills, meant that you had to produce 10 fewer units of something else. Hence, the economy was optimized so that only as many as strictly necessary of most goods would be manufactured. Additionally, the products were design to require the least amount of labour and resources necessary to be manufactured, taking into account mostly long-life and easy repairability to prevent inefficiencies. It was the only way that the USSR could, as a less industrialized state than for example Germany or the US or Britain (which had started industrialising around one century before the USSR did), could provide goods for everyone, and for the most part it did. The quality of products may not have been as high as high-quality consumer goods in the west, but that’s simply a combination of design choice to be available to cover more goods with similar amounts of raw materials and labour, of fewer experts in design and manufacturing than worldwide due to the size of the soviet block and their economical embargos.
They couldn’t have been that isolated when they were directly buying and copying western designs. The first version of Tetris was programmed on what is more or less the Soviet clone of the DEC PDP-11.
Being able to purchase some models of some products here and there doesn’t mean you can sustain a segment of the industry through imports
On non-complex stuff, I wish some of our shit was still built to last like shortage economy stuff was. It seems like planned obsolescence creeped from a handful of products to basically everything.
A lot of it is market forces and globalization — people just get the cheapest version off Amazon if they don’t know the brands — but even relatively expensive clothes, tools, charging cables, etc. break all the fucking time.
This isn’t a communist vs. capitalist rant so much as an old man one. Simple products were generally better quality in the past. The cars broke down more but the tools you needed to fix them lasted fucking generations. Jeans didn’t just rip like they do now. Even things like pocket knives lasted forever if you took basic care of them. You can still find quality products but it’s increasingly impossible in some product categories.
Planned obsolescence is a direct consequence of capitalism, and it gets worse the more capitalism develops. Capitalism, through competition and markets, makes some companies triumph and some companies to be outcompeted by the ones that triumph. This, coupled with ever-increasing capital investment by the companies that get the most profits, leads unequivocally and necessarily to increasing concentration of capital in the hands of a few companies in a given sector: oligopoly and monopoly. And when a sector is dominated by oligopoly and monopoly, it means competition between companies, the whole premise of capitalism, disappears. And it is at that point when malpractice such as planned obsolescence becomes a thing, because consumers literally don’t have a choice.
You’re absolutely right that it would be great to go back to times before planned obsolescence, but the only possible way to do so is politically, by eliminating the very system that leads to planned obsolescence.
I’m genuine curious if it’s any good.
Russians are kinda EE experts. If anyone’s gonna resolder their GPU…
They could call it the Dendy 360 or something
I guess the Kremlin thinks that it’s a soft power concern (subversive Western ideas in front of our children’s eyeballs), but in all seriousness, this seems way down on the list of things that I’d be worried about if I were them.
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In terms of exposure to a domestic audience, consoles are closed platforms. They can probably mostly restrict creation and sale of Russian-language content that they find politically-objectionable. That’s probably a lot easier and cheaper than trying to produce a new state-subsidized console.
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Scale matters here. China hasn’t done this. If China hasn’t done it, I doubt that it’s gonna go well for Russia.
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This is gonna drag people off projects that they’re actually gonna need more in terms of import substitution. I mean, direct military stuff aside, your whole economy is gonna have problems with lack of access to stuff from outside.
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Consoles have a relatively-low gaming marketshare today, due to mobile. They’re probably globally the least-important.
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Of all of the gaming platforms out there, PC, console, and mobile, consoles are the least-useful in terms of non-game applications. If Russia wants to be a player in one of those, consoles would be the last I’d choose. It’d probably be easier to just ban consoles in Russia, if necessary.
Three side remarks about China, which can be a peculiar example to compare to for Russia, maybe even any other country:
- They actually banned consoles for a quite significant 15 years (2000–2015), which strongly tilted their market towards PC.
- Their companies actively make PC-type gaming handhelds, and many of them are even well-established in the business ahead the current “Steam Deck” wave/bandwagon: GPD (once called GamePad Digital, first release in 2016), OneXPlayer (2020), Ayaneo (2021).
- Chinese gaming companies are quite at the whim of the censorship, and occasional “crackdowns” out of the blue, and many have therefore reoriented themselves for an international audience to de-risk their business.
I will believe it when I see it. Who will be making games for them, I wonder.
They can just reskin steamdeck and sell pirated content, aint shit anyone can do to stop them.
Do they have the hardware for it? There’s an embargo on all of the relevant hardware…
They can make their own chips, but on super old equipment, so it’ll run hot and poorly. So they’ll be limited in what domestically produced equipment can run.
Embargo on mid level amd chips?
They still seem to be getting them either way.
Russian programmers are pretty good; don’t underestimate them. A lot of them are focused on malware, mind you.
I don’t expect Russia will make a console on par with a PS5, but they might make one closer to the hardware of a SNES Classic mini-console.
You are right, but you should remember that a lot of them fled the country to skip conscript. Moreover, games are made a very long time, 4-5 years minimum and it costs a lot of money. And to make independent platform you must create a lot of games because no one will buy it if you can’t play at anything.
