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Russia continues work on homegrown game console despite technology and scale issues
(www.tomshardware.com)
They could call it the Dendy 360 or something
this post was submitted on 16 Jun 2024
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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.
Lolwut? USSR recovered from being a devastated bomb crater of a country faster than Europe did on American dollar while waging a cold war against the rest of the world. They beat the US to space time and time again too.
Come the 80s, their manufacturing was well ahead of the west, and there weren't any food issues either, so I'm not sure what you mean? The horrors of Stalin's collectivisation efforts were a good bit before the cold war, and that wasn't really an issue of food manufacturing.
Nobody was forced to do any type of work more than anybody is under capitalism, if anything under capitalism as it is today - you take what you are given.
In the USSR, higher education being free (as is the socialist tradition) gave people a lot more choice, no need to balance student debt against future potential earnings and as such ability to pay health expenses, like we see in the US today.
They suffered from consumer goods issues because things like game consoles and tamagotchi can't exactly be planned in a planned economy.
It's why I personally believe in a dual-economy, where necessities are planned centrally, from housing to infrastructure to utilities and independent worker co-operatives do the rest, I think that's the lesson there ultimately. Oh and fuck the Russian Federation.
Come the 80s, their manufacturing was well ahead of the west, and there weren’t any food issues either.
That's not true. While the USSR did have a significant manufacturing capacity, it was often inefficient due to the planned economy. This led to factories closing after 1991 because they couldn't compete with the free market. The quality of products was often subpar, and there was a lack of diversity and functionality. In fact, many essential items weren't even manufactured.
This was a major contributor to the Soviet Union's economic downfall and eventual collapse. If you read archival records (available through various books, for instance), you'll find that even high-ranking officials like ministers and vice ministers were writing letters to each other in the 80s about the poor output in their respective sectors, including the oil industry, which was struggling due to outdated technology.
In the USSR, higher education being free (as is the socialist tradition) gave people a lot more choice
The idea that the Soviet Union had exceptional higher education is a myth. In reality, their education system was overly focused on technical skills, neglecting essential life skills like critical thinking, creativity, decision-making, and many others.
This became apparent in the 90s when many supposedly 'highly educated' individuals were involved in fraudulent schemes, failed to build and stand for democracy. While it's true that the USSR produced some outstanding scientists, that's where the excellence ended. A society cannot thrive solely on the backs of scientists and enginners. A well-rounded education is essential for prosperity.
In reality, their education system was overly focused on technical skills, neglecting essential life skills like critical thinking, creativity, decision-making, and many others.
The US is the only country in the western world that teaches strictly extra-curricular matters at a university level, afaik. I went to uni in the UK for computer science, all of my classes were only about computer science and it's subdomains only, there are no "life skills" classes.
This became apparent in the 90s when many supposedly 'highly educated' individuals were involved in fraudulent schemes, failed to build and stand for democracy
As opposed to the low levels of fraud and extremely healthy democracies of which countries exactly?
As for the rest of your claims I would like to see direct sources. The "essential items" tidbit in particular I find suspect because the definition is quite fickle and the idea is subjective and depends on circumstances. Cars were famously not very common amongst USSR citizens. What was though is public transport, and we're now in the west finding out that neglecting public transport and shifting towards personal vehicles has been a huge mistake, so that's that.
I'd recommend reading some books about the Soviet Union, particularly its later years. It's not feasible for me to provide an in-depth education on this topic in a single post. It's clear that you are not knowledgeable, and I'm not sure why you're arguing without being informed on the subject ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
We get extra curricular in universities in Canada as well
I think you're looking at history through rose-colored glasses. Read pretty much any story from those who left the USSR to get a better picture of how life was there. Here are a two that I've read:
- The Persecutor
- A Backpack, A Bear, and Eight Crates of Vodka
Feel free to find your own, but I find real stories of people trying to flee more valuable in understanding life in an area than books with economic figures.
If life was so good there, why did so many try to flee? Leaving was incredibly hard, why was that?
I personally believe in a dual-economy
I disagree, but we probably agree more than we disagree.
For example, I believe in a strong safety net (something like UBI), and believe we should eliminate minimum wages. If you don't need to work to meet basic needs (food and shelter), you won't take work unless it improves on that basic set of needs. Maybe that means we'll increase automation or immigration to fill roles nobody wants, or maybe that means pay will increase. Either way, it shouldn't be centrally planned.
I think the lesson from the USSR is that centrally planned economies are repressive, and that we need to come up with better ways of solving the needs of the poor or we'll have another popular uprising that goes way beyond what anyone actually wanted.
Socialist policies should be limited, imo, to voluntary associations, like co-ops and private unions. It shouldn't enter government policy because politicians like power more than actually helping people.
Read pretty much any story from those who left the USSR to get a better picture of how life was there.
A very unbiased account indeed
but I find real stories of people trying to flee more valuable in understanding life in an area than books with economic figures.
I don't. People for the most part are morons that gulp down ivermectin and bleach enemas by the truckload to make their healing crystals work in time for Sunday church, so they can pray away the gay. People are fickle, and are often at odds with facts. As a trans person I know this well.
If life was so good there
That's the neat part, I never claimed that. The USSR was a shithole, but the user I originally responded to was wrong as well. Two things can be true at once.
UBI
Or just nationalize necessities to cut out capitalist middlemen taking a cut. All a UBI of $100 will do is raise prices by $100 because people now have $100 more, and landlords et al. will want those $100. Under capitalism and neoliberalism the rich will always be at the top of the food chain in this manner.
Socialist policies should be limited, imo, to voluntary associations, like co-ops and private unions.
So they can be easily crushed by capitalist lobbying in western """"democracies""".
I admire neolibs who genuinely want to make things better, and you have my respect for that, but I think you're just a bit naive and haven't quite thought everything through.
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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 class~~ capitalist parasites better than a supposedly communist system did.
FTFY.
Also, learn what the word "irony" means.
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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.
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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
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.
especially since it didn’t abuse colonialism and imperialism to do so
HAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHHAHAHHAHAHAHHAHAHAH
deep breath
HAHAHHAHAHAHHAHAHHAHAHHAHAHAHHAHAHAH
Tell me you don't understand colonialism and imperialism without telling me you don't understand colonialism and imperialism.
You haven't read a single thing about unequal exchange, or colonialism, or imperialism. The western countries (imperial core) RELY on cheap raw materials and cheap labour from third countries (colonial periphery) to be able to attain the levels of wealth and development that they enjoy. The USSR simply didn't participate in this, and you saying otherwise proves you know jackshit about this topics or about history.
HAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHHAHAHHAHAHAHHAHAHAH
deep breath
HAHAHHAHAHAHHAHAHHAHAHHAHAHAHHAHAHAH
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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 would probably call it something like Нахуящик. I think it would resonate better with local audiences.
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I'm genuine curious if it's any good.
Russians are kinda EE experts. If anyone's gonna resolder their GPU...
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.
Two 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.
This is certainly a choice.
I feel bad for the devs they’re going to hold at gunpoint.
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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.
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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.
From what I hear, the war spending is still pretty low, all things considered. This could just be another autarky subsidy.
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Blyatstation is going to be a huge success, trust me.
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