Hey, Vlad, Where The Hell Is My SputnikStation Gaming Console?
Those of you who are video game fanatics like me know the feeling. There’s a brand new gaming console on the way and every couple of days you do some googling for updates, release dates, or any kind of news on it. The manufacturers of these consoles often do a drip campaign when it comes to releasing information about the new console, while millions of fans hang on the edge of their seats, desperate for reveals, news, whatever we can get our hands on. And just like me, you’re probably in this headspace right now. You know a new console is coming, but all the news coming out from the source of the console is about unrelated things.
What? The Nintendo Switch 2? That’s what you thought I was talking about?
No, I want to know when the hell I’m going to get the Russian gaming console, one that was to rival PlayStation and Xbox consoles, and one that was supposed to be released over the summer.
See, after the gaming industry of the West largely pulled out of Russia, or at least restricted what Russian citizens could buy and play, Vladimir Putin ordered two Russian companies to produce a Russian rival to Sony and Microsoft gaming consoles by June. Of 2024. And that edict was delivered in April, three months before that due date.
Per a report from the Russian newspaper Kommersant, the order was handed down from the Kremlin to “consider the issue of organizing the production of stationary and portable game consoles and game consoles.” Kommersant’s sources tell the nationally distributed Russian paper that the VK Group, a major Russian tech company behind the similarly named social media service VK, will be largely responsible for the project. The production of consoles will be handled by the GS Group, which was previously known as General Satellite and is the single largest Russian developer of set-top boxes.
In the infamous words of Judge Smailes:
Unless I somehow missed it (I didn’t), Russia has yet to announce the release of the SputnikStation 1 or whatever they would call it. No word on any progress on a console that I can find, mobile or otherwise. No first party titles announced for production. No hardware specs put on display. In fact, it looks for all the world like the two companies tasked by Putin to create these consoles ignored the order all together. That’s not a great look for an iron-fisted dictator, I would think.
What one of the companies in question, VK, managed to get out the door was a website that merely lets Russian players stream Nintendo games illicitly.
The site in question is VK Play, a video game platform run by VKontakte. And VKontakte, also known as VK for short, is a Russian social media website based in St. Petersburg. VK has faced prior controversies from the massive copyright infringement that happens in it. They have subsequently faced legal threats and had to resolve these issues with their own copyright tracker and IP reporting system.
This page, translated by Google from Russian to English, clearly shows, among other things, a link to play [several Nintendo games] in the cloud. So it’s possible what’s happening here is that this website is connected to a server farm with actual Nintendo Switch consoles running these games.
Alternately, they could be running this on a server farm filled with emulators running Switch. The latter scenario might sound like the better option, since they could run Switch games on more powerful hardware. But it runs the risk of compatibility issues.
While we’ve come to expect this from the kleptocracy that is Russia, this hardly delivers on the command from Putin. This is merely more grift from a country that has openly embraced said grift.
I suppose I could continue to wait for whatever this Russian console might be, but somehow I’m having a hard time imagining a console, any console, from coming out anytime soon.