Izvestia: The Ministry of Defense created “Battleship” and “Tetris” instead of Russian Warcraft, spending 36 million

The Ministry of Defense’s idea to create "cool" patriotic military computer games turned out to be a surprise. Instead of products that can compete with popular (usually Western) shooters and strategies, four flash games appeared on the department’s website. The military department spent 36 million rubles on the development of them and the information portal itself. Meanwhile, professional developers criticized the presented games, saying that the ministry had seriously overpaid, the Izvestia newspaper writes.

Three games – "Sapper", "Tetris" And "Sea battle" – already exist from other developers, and the “Military Rank Test” generally suspiciously resembles “games” with fraudulent use of SMS.

According to independent experts, even if the Ministry of Defense created the games posted on its website independently, each game could not cost more than 320 thousand. rubles. Each of the games that are currently on the department’s website takes a month to complete with the efforts of a maximum of three people – a programmer, a flasher and an artist. Flasher salary 45-50 thousand. rubles per month, programmer – 100 thousand., artist – 100 thousand. So the maximum cost of one such computer game, even taking into account the purchase of computers and electricity costs, is 10 thousand. dollars.

Experts also note that https://casinobetfair.uk/bonus/ for 30 million rubles you can make a really interesting game with high-quality graphics. The IT applications presented on the website of the Ministry of Defense have poor graphics, as well as a complete lack of any novelty in the software sector, notes The Moscow Post.

The publication wonders what the millions spent were spent on, and suggests that this could be another withdrawal of budget funds by inflating the price of developing computer applications. Simply put, another “cut”. “It seems that they (the money) were simply stolen, written off as fictitious estimates for the development of computer games,” says an article posted on the website.

The Ministry of Defense refutes this kind of criticism and suspicion. Head of the press service and information department of the Ministry of Defense Igor Konashenkov explained that “the created information portal of the military department is a completely new information platform with almost unlimited possibilities for further development and filling with multimedia content. It consists of dozens of thematic sections telling about various aspects of the activities of the Armed Forces and aimed at various age categories of Internet users.”.

Let us recall that the idea of ​​​​creating military computer games in which children would play “for Russians, and not for Americans” was expressed by State Secretary of the Ministry of Defense Nikolai Pankov back in June 2010 at a joint board of the Prosecutor General’s Office, the Ministry of Defense, the Ministry of Education and Science and the Ministry of Sports Tourism. His proposal was a response to criticism from then Deputy Prime Minister Sergei Sobyanin, who called the existing methods of patriotic education of youth “mossy” and ineffective.

A year later, President Dmitry Medvedev proposed creating a Russian analogue of the famous online game World of Warcraft. Two months later, in September 2011, the Ministry of Education and Science held a competition to create the technical core (engine) of such a game for 90 million rubles. However, due to the lack of participants it did not take place.

It should be noted that earlier the Ministry of Telecom and Mass Communications requested 500 million budget rubles for the development of a new generation of computer gaming simulators. Most experts were skeptical about the project, and bloggers openly called the initiative of officials another way to “stick to the budget”.