Quiet games – Newspaper Kommersant No. 17 (7462) of 01/31/2023
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The Russian game industry is afraid of restricting access to soundtrack and sound effects licensing services for video game development. This issue, according to Kommersant, has already been discussed in the Ministry of Digital Development. Companies now mainly use foreign Pond5 and Artlist, and there are few such sites in Russia. So far, developers who have a legal entity and accounts abroad can pay for foreign licenses, but beginners may face an access problem, experts say.
On January 27, the Ministry of Digital Development held a meeting with representatives of Russian gaming companies and specialized organizations that were part of the specialized development competence center (CCR, including representatives of VK and the Internet Development Institute), a source familiar with the discussion told Kommersant. According to two other interlocutors of Kommersant, officials and market participants discussed the problems that the gaming industry may face due to sanctions, for example, the possible restriction of access to foreign development tools, in particular, 2D and 3D graphics editors. The ministry declined to comment.
According to a Kommersant source close to VK, among the problems, the meeting participants also named the lack of specialized audio stocks in Russia – services that allow you to buy licenses for compositions or sound effects used in video games: “Studios, as a rule, used foreign services, and it is not clear what will happen if they lose the ability to legally purchase the necessary sound sets or soundtracks.” Illegal use of audio, according to him, will close access to foreign game distribution sites.
Russian game studios and IT companies have repeatedly discussed with government officials the problems that arose as a result of the military operation in Ukraine, but the issue of audio stocks arose for the first time. In the spring of 2022, the presidential administration (AP) held a meeting with game developers – it, in particular, discussed the risk of losing access to game engines (video game development tools) Unity and Unreal Engine (see “Kommersant” dated May 20, 2022) . According to Kommersant, VK is developing its engine with the expectation of releasing a demo game in 2025 (see Kommersant dated November 19, 2022).
The most popular services in the industry are Pond5, AudioJingle, Artlist and Epidemic Sound, a sound engineer from one of the development studios explained to Kommersant. He is not aware of cases when large projects were voiced without licensing third-party audio: “Surely there are independent small projects where the author records sounds, but a complex game cannot be voiced like that. You can write music yourself, but licensing can speed up the process, and recognizable tracks will set the right atmosphere.” Audio files for games, he says, often require different instruments or parts of the sound to be separated from each other.
Russian companies that licensed audio from foreign platforms began to conclude agreements with domestic platforms in 2022, said Pavel Kudelin, CEO of AV3.studio. Among them, according to him, for example, “Zvukobaza”. Foreign services, Mr. Kudelin added, are still technically available to licensors from Russia, but their services have to be paid from foreign accounts.
Libraries of sounds, textures, models and other components for games are often formed around the tools that developers use, says Vasily Ovchinnikov, head of the Video Game Industry Development Organization: “Asset stores (ready-made components.— “b”) is available on the Unity and Unreal Engine websites, in the independent games store itch.io. Many studios, according to him, have no problems with buying components, “since they already have foreign legal entities,” but novice developers may encounter problems: “There are also free assets, but they are more suitable for prototypes or amateur projects.”
According to the expert, to solve the problem, publishers with structures abroad could buy components for small developers, and their own sound store after the development of the engine looks logical for VK.
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