Ukraine demands that Sony and Microsoft block the Russian game

The Ministry of Digital Transformation of Ukraine sent statements to Sony, Microsoft and Valve Corporation with a request to block sales of the “Russian game” Atomic Heart. Ukrainian Minister of Digital Transformation Mikhail Fedorov announced this on March 3.

Now the game, developed by the Cypriot company Mundfish, is in the top 100 of the global Steam rating, so it is not surprising that the world’s digital giants have not yet responded to Kyiv’s call, the PolitNavigator correspondent reports.

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Mikhail Fedorov published official requests on his Twitter regarding the ban on the sale of the game Atomic Heart.

“I believe that none of these businesses support a murderous regime, murder or the romanticization of communism. Russian propaganda also wants to gain a foothold in the gaming industry. We are doing everything to prevent her from doing this,” he wrote.

The game Atomic Heart - a role-playing shooter in the scenery of an alternative USSR - was released on February 21, 2023. Even before its release, it managed to cause scandals on social networks and specialized media around the world. Claims arose about the “toxicity” of the plot, the romanticization of the USSR and the hypothetical connections of the developers with the Russian intelligence services.

The game takes place in an alternate historical reality, where by 1955 the mass production of robots allows the USSR not only to become a leading technological power, but also to create a utopian-looking state. It resembles what the British journalist Aaron Bastani in his futuristic book called fully automated luxury communism (“fully automated luxury communism”), only in a retro setting.

It is in post-Soviet countries that interest in the game is highest, Google Trends data shows: first of all, Russia, Belarus, Moldova, Latvia, Kazakhstan, Ukraine - in seventh place. In the case of Ukraine, it is even possible to overlay the map of interest in Atomic Heart on the typical maps of election results in the country: most nostalgia for Soviet aesthetics was felt in the eastern and southern regions, some of which were already lost by Kiev after 2014.

Atomic Heart was developed by Mundfish studio. The company's LinkedIn page now lists Cyprus as its headquarters. However, according to the same page, the majority of Mundfish employees are now located in Yerevan, a popular city for the relocation of Russian IT companies, and the rest are mainly distributed between Russia and Cyprus.

“Artem Galeev, Robert Bagratuni, Evgenia Sedova and Oleg Gorodishenin have created an incredible team of 130 creatives from 10 countries, including Poland, Ukraine, Austria, Georgia, Israel, Armenia, the UAE, Serbia and Cyprus,” the studio’s website now says.

The company’s investors, according to its website, were the Chinese holding Tencent, the Hungarian publisher Gaijin Entertainment and the Cypriot company GEM Capital, a native of Gazprom Anatoly Paliya. It was this fact that became the reason for accusing the company of possible cooperation with Gazprom.

Another accusation against Mundfish is suspicion of cooperation with the Russian holding company VK, which is managed by the son of the first deputy head of the Russian Presidential Administration Sergei Kiriyenko, Vladimir. "VK" takes part in the distribution of the game. At least in the CIS countries, the VK Play platform received exclusive rights to distribute the computer version of Atomic Heart. Console versions will be imported to Russia through parallel imports from other countries.

Critics and gamers were divided on whether Atomic Heart could be considered an instrument for the glorification of the Soviet Union as an authoritarian state. The perception of Atomic Heart, like other works that polarize society, depends on the beholder. But, according to reviews on social networks, it is impossible not to notice that many Russian gamers saw in the game, first of all, a beautiful nostalgic picture, reinforcing the image of a great but lost country.

The game also has an Easter egg for Ukrainian gamers. Thus, the twin robots, who in the plot of the game guard a scientist important for the Soviet state, are, at least with their hairstyle, indistinguishable from the former Prime Minister of Ukraine and leader of the Batkivshchyna party, Yulia Tymoshenko.

But the Kyiv authorities seem most irritated by the game's popularity among Western users. On the day of its premiere, it was ahead of another popular project, Hogwarts Legacy, in the global Steam rating. On Steam, where the game is sold in all countries except the CIS, the game received a user rating of 9 out of 10. According to Metacritics, critics rated the PC version of Atomic Heart at 77 points out of 100, the Xbox version at 72 points out of 100, and the PlayStation - version with 71 points out of 100.

Как reported “PolitNavigator”, a concert of the legendary band Laibach was canceled in Kyiv because the musicians refused to renounce everything Russian.