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).
Sure, when you can force the workforce to do a thing,
Yeah… turns out that homelessness is a great motivator.
But they’ll probably do it slower than if they chose to do it.
Soooo… just like wage slaves, eh?
food production, basic manufacturing
After 1947 there was no great problems with food production in the USSR. Still… you’re not really wrong. The capitalist mode of production does offer a feedback system for consumer goods - even though it’s a pretty terrible one that only works as long as the capitalists have to compete for a well-paid populace’s buying power.
If I recall correctly the USSR was a pretty steady grain importer throughout their history
As far as I’m aware, the USSR started importing grain in the 60s - primarily to feed livestock as meat became a regular thing for Soviet citizens.
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.
. . . anything and everything to do with space.
No. Just no. Soviets had their successes, but they were bad at building fundamental tech. Their space program was callous towards both human and animal life. They were focused on being the first at everything, and tended to run with the solution they could implement immediately. It wasn’t built in a way where successes could be leveraged for more successes. Nor did it build fundamental tech in ways that could be used in the economy at large.
Ironically, capitalism was able use space technology to improve the lives of the working class better than a supposedly communist system did.
but they were bad at building fundamental tech.
Yeah, they were so bad at it that they ended up in space first. Just absolutely terrible.
Their space program was callous towards both human and animal life.
Show us your proof, PragerU fan.
It wasn’t built in a way where successes could be leveraged for more successes.
So the Soviet Union launching Sputnik had absolutely nothing to do with them successfully landing Venera 7 on the surface of Venus?
Absolutely nothing at all, eh?
capitalism was able use space technology to improve the lives of the
working classcapitalist parasites better than a supposedly communist system did.FTFY.
Also, learn what the word “irony” means.
It’s well known that horrible things happened to animals during the Russian space program.
You sound like a liberal trying way too hard to pretend they aren’t one by coming up with absolutely shit takes which are demonstrably incorrect. I’m actually surprised I didn’t realize this until now. You’re so over the top that overcompensation is the most charitable explanation.
It’s well known that horrible things happened to animals during the Russian space program.
Yes… “everybody” knows that the “Jewish-Bolshevist horde” couldn’t possibly have an ounce of human compassion for animals, isn’t it?
But hold on there before you start calling for another go at “lebensraum,” Clyde - let’s first check who it is that you are actually comparing them to, shall we?
You sound like a liberal
Stop projecting, liberal - I’m not the one jerking off Cold War propaganda here. You are.
Yeah, they were so bad at it that they ended up in space first. Just absolutely terrible.
And rushed it so bad they didn’t have fundamental tech that was applicable to a wider economy.
Their space program was callous towards both human and animal life.
Show us your proof, PragerU fan.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laika#Ethics_of_animal_testing
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nedelin_catastrophe
The Soviet rocket program failed a lot, but they covered it up at the time. It’s largely come out in the time since then, and it was horrific. If NASA lost an astronaut, everything shuts down and they figure out what happens. When a test site in Russia blowed up and kills over 50 people, including the head of the development program, that’s just Tuesday.
capitalism was able use space technology to improve the lives of the working class capitalist parasites better than a supposedly communist system did.
FTFY.
Nah, I like my version better. The proof is the machine you’re using to type this.
Also, I’m a socialist. I just don’t think the USSR was very good system. There’s both positive and negative things to learn from it, but the most important is “let’s not do that again”.
And rushed it so bad they didn’t have fundamental tech that was applicable to a wider economy
I hate to break it to you, Clyde - but the central technologies developed by the space race was “applicable to a wider economy” on both sides of the Cold War. The USSR had weather and communications satellites, too - unless you want to argue that those served no economic purpose to the USSR, perhaps?. Perhaps you are a bit too dazzled by all the anciliary stuff that dominates your consumerist fantasies? I’m sure you believe NASA’s handheld vacuum cleaners made capitalism better for all the people that didn’t get to live the middle-class WASP dream thanks to the New Deal… but it really didn’t.
Handing off publicly-funded research and development to be used as a means of private profiteering for the capitalist class at the expense of everyone else (including you) is simply the way the US has always done technology - pretending that the USSR not doing the same is somehow a “flaw” is peak neoliberalism.
Their space program was callous towards both human and animal life.
I guess it’s a good thing that NASA wasn’t very forthcoming with their animal experimentation, eh? I wonder if the outcry would have been the same?
Yeah… sounds like Tuesday to me.
Khrushchev also ordered Leonid Brezhnev to head an investigation commission and go to the site.[11] Among other things, the commission found that many more people were present on the launch pad than should have been—most were supposed to be safely offsite in bunkers.
When Brezhnev arrived at the firing range on 25 October 1960, he said: “Comrades! We do not intend to put anyone on trial; we are going to investigate the causes and take actions to recover from the disaster and continue operations”
Afterwards, when Nikita Khrushchev asked Yangel, “But why have you remained alive?”, Yangel answered in a trembling voice, “Walked away for a smoke. It’s all my fault”. Yangel later suffered a heart attack and was off work for months.
After all… we can’t pretend thay the “Jewish-Bolshevist horde” would actually value human life now, can we? What would Reagan say?
Nah, I like my version better.
Yeah, you do, because you’re an edgy liberal self-applying the term “socialist” without understanding what it means because you desperately want to distance yourself from your capitalist and fascist brethren while still buying into the same beliefs they hold on to.
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.
Ternary computing is some serious alt-history fodder.
It’s interesting, but the electronics are more complicated. There’s a reason that everything standardized on base 2, including in Russia after the 1950s.
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.
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.
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
They didn’t just buy them (although there was some of that). They cloned them outright. They had the manufacturing capability to make them on their own, but lacked the knowledge of how to build it themselves.
Yeah I’m not denying they cloned them, I’m saying they were cloned due to the inability to access them widely and affordably in the international market. Cloning stuff is good btw, copyright is a scam
Cloning stuff is good. Not being capable of designing and building your own is bad. It means you can never improve on what already exists.
It wasn’t for lack of engineers. The Buran rocket’s first and only flight took off and landed on 100% automation. That’s not easy. But didn’t build things in ways that could benefit people in a more widespread way.
Again, you can’t expect the USSR, a nation that started industrialising and educating people in 1920s, to be able to outcompete the entire rest of the world in every sector of the economy. It was a poorer nation than the US, Germany or England historically, it developed much later. The fact that it got as far as it did is impressive enough of a feat, especially since it didn’t abuse colonialism and imperialism to do so, but instead used only the sheer work of its inhabitants and the natural resources found within its borders. The USSR falling behind in some extremely novel fields such as computing, is only to be expected.
good look to them trying to revelse engineer a modern CPU lmao
I would probably call it something like Нахуящик. I think it would resonate better with local audiences.
Excited for the Blyat Boy Advance
Guess they can’t keep buying Xbox controllers fpr their drones. So they create a console to get kids to play video games and natively learn the new controller they will eventually use on the battlefield
I hate how accurate you are. There’s no other reason it would be government backed ESPECIALLY during war time where they’re pissing money away and losing their soldiers left and right without be able to fill the open spots.
Call of Duty is very literally the greatest military recruitment tool the US government has and I’m pretty sure the c-levels at Activision have been full of former state department officials for the last 15 years
I remember seeing a documentary about Tom Cruise and how the movie Top Gun made lots of young people sign up for the military. Just a fun fact, not arguing against you.
I know that to get the US military to let you use their planes or their boats they need approval on the final film so tobget the really good shots and set pieces you have to let yourself be used as propaganda
Well, the reasons are probably:
- wanting to develop domestic chips
- wanting to develop software companies
- wanting to push russian culture among the young population
- and others
From what I hear, the war spending is still pretty low, all things considered. This could just be another autarky subsidy.
They could call it the Dendy 360 or something
Soviet jump game 2 when?? 👀
Doubtful, given that Dendi is Ukrainian…
But now that I think of it, he’s a Russian speaking Ukranian so maybe he WOULD be their first choice…
This is certainly a choice.
I feel bad for the devs they’re going to hold at gunpoint.
I wonder if they’re going to do digital or physical releases. It would probably save more money if they didn’t have physical media.
Would be funny if Western games companies start getting in on it. Although I suspect that everything on it’ll be mobile game quality garbage.
can’t wait for “next to last fantasy” to come out
And Smash Bandhooter, Blyat and Jaxter, Guitar-Trompetto, Road Combater, Earthly Fight, 770 Brass Peeper, and of course, let’s not forget; Trophy of Courage: Ukrainian Front.
The courage that inspired armies…to steal toilets.
Blyatstation is going to be a huge success, trust me.
I bet they will release some rebranded chinese android console with a shitload of cracked games and call it a day.
Tracking*
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.
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The Dendy Deck is the most exciting console ever made! I am totally not being held at gunpoint in front of a window right now!
Immediately made me think of this.
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.
Sure, through black market channels, but that’s a very different problem than building a domestic product around a certain chip.
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.
But what about game designers and artists? There’s a good reason why eurojank exists.
Rosconsole is best Russian console! Play exciting Russian video games!
• Is Drink Borscht Contest
• Vote for Putin
• Call of Russian Duty: Freed Maximum Security Prisoner Ops
• Tetris
• Federation of International Bandy Jam
• Soviet Food Line Simulator
In orbanistan (hungary) occuppied by soviets for 40 years (but even today orban is in the pocket of putin), we have a joke: “the problem with soviet/russian microelectronics: the product does not fit through the factory gate”
I’m genuine curious if it’s any good.
Russians are kinda EE experts. If anyone’s gonna resolder their GPU…
