The Russian Federation ranks first in the world for prize money in Counter-Strike 2, a game created and distributed by a US company (12). In those same years Moscow funds patriotic video games to answer, in narrative terms, the Western titles that cast it as the enemy, yet to produce and distribute them it must rely on engines, storefronts, and payment systems that remain outside its control. How and why two such distant facts coexist is the question this work sets out from.
The relationship between imagination and infrastructure bends in two opposite directions depending on who passes through it. A Western product with low political legibility can take root in Russia, while a Russian counter-narrative struggles to cross borders when it tries to project itself outward. Narrative architecture is now inseparable from infrastructural architecture, and the Russian case shows this with rare clarity.
The Russian Double Dynamic
On one side, Russia tries to project an imaginary of its own, to defend its symbolic core, and to answer representations it perceives as hostile. On the other, it appears frequently as the object of narratives produced elsewhere, above all in the mainstream genres tied to war, espionage, and security, where the country is placed within recurring patterns of threat, opacity, and strategic antagonism (1). This is the Russian double dynamic. The question thus moves beyond outward-facing soft power and bears on the management of an image already entrenched in global cultural repertoires.
The perspective of an actor accustomed to operating within this double narrative horizon is therefore especially useful. Part of the Russian academic literature offers an internal interpretive lens that helps clarify how, for some time now, the medium has been understood beyond entertainment, as a device capable of shaping mass consciousness, collective representations, and, more broadly, the political imaginary (2). One study discussed in circles linked to IMEMO, the Institute of World Economy and International Relations, is emblematic in this respect. There, video games are read as instruments able to influence social perception and to intervene in the symbolic construction of reality.
On a less conceptual and far more operational plane stands Sergey Belov, a political scientist at Moscow State University, who in 2021 assesses the potential of video games as a tool for positioning Russian foreign policy (14). He starts from an empirical frame, a 2019 VTsIOM survey according to which roughly twenty percent of adult Russians play, with a more marked presence among the young, since in the eighteen-to-twenty-four bracket forty percent devote eight hours a week to video games. Drawing on a series of expert interviews, he segments the audience by political interest and narrative appetite and pairs each segment with a genre. To players distant from politics he assigns light simulators, even humorous ones, up to a hypothetical ambassador simulator in which the Russian posture stays in the background. To the audience of intermittent interest he reserves shooters and stealth-shooters anchored to the role of the Russian Armed Forces in theaters such as Syria and Libya. To politically engaged players he proposes role-playing games, adventures, and strategy titles built on long-running themes, from the annexation of Crimea to the 2008 war in Georgia.
The logic is programmatic, and Belov pushes it as far as calling for a coordinated strategy among government structures, firms, and experts to translate the Russian Federation's international posture into ludic experiences calibrated for different audiences. The reflection has not run its course, and in 2025 he returns to the subject in public, discussing video games as an instrument of soft power and memory politics, a sign that in Russian expert debate the medium is conceived as a resource to be built, as well as a threat to be guarded against (15).
The two readings share a center of gravity and a blind spot. Strokova insists on consciousness and representation, Belov on genre, target, and message. Yet both leave in the background the infrastructural plane on which video games are built, hosted, updated, and monetized. Belov's operational sophistication makes that silence sharper still, because Russian expert discourse goes as far as specifying what to say, to whom, and in which genre, while taking for granted that the games can be produced and distributed. This is an analytical asymmetry in itself, because the contemporary game, before being a device of meaning, is a contingent commodity, continually reshaped by the platforms that host it, an artifact whose audience, whose lifespan, and even whose narrative arc depend on engine updates, on storefront ranking, on live-service architectures, and on the governance decisions of the corporate intermediaries that sit between producer and player.
Enemies and Procedures. Counter-Strike and the Legibility That Matters More Than Origin
In a number of widely distributed European and American titles, among them Call of Duty Modern Warfare and Black Ops or Battlefield Bad Company 2, Russians, along with the factions and private military actors associated with them, are portrayed as violent enemies. The prevalence of this pattern has fed, within the Russian context, the perception of having to answer on the same ground, contesting the image on the very medium that produced it.
Alongside the hostile representation, however, the Russian player also makes Western gaming an experience of a different kind, and it is the case of Counter-Strike, where this work began, that makes it evident. The game, developed and distributed by Valve through Steam, remains one of the most played titles in Russia, yet it does not organize the experience around a story in which Russia figures as a threat. Its scale is considerable, with an all-time peak of 1,862,531 concurrent players recorded by SteamDB on 12 April 2025 (11). Russian centrality also registers on the competitive plane, where Esports Earnings credits the Russian Federation with roughly $6.6 million in Counter-Strike 2 prize money, spread across more than five hundred players, ahead of Denmark and Ukraine (12). Industry estimates of player-base distribution point to Russia as one of the game's main national pools, a figure that remains indicative because it does not come from official Valve data. By way of context, the aggregated data from Statista point to a Russian gaming audience on the order of twenty-two million users, with a player share close to sixty percent of the population (13).
What matters here is the distance between the nationality of the infrastructure and the legibility of the narrative. Counter-Strike is American at the infrastructural level, since it rests on Valve, Steam, the Source 2 engine, accounts, the skins market, and updates, and at the same time it remains barely legible as geopolitical narrative, because it offers a competitive grammar of abstract, reversible roles rather than a national narrative arc. The game denarrativizes violence, strips it of the form of geopolitical storytelling and recomposes it as procedure, attack and defend, plant and defuse, hold angles, manage the round economy. The Russian player inhabits a tactical function and encounters only minimally a hostile representation of their own national identity.
Another factor in the Russian popularity of Counter-Strike may lie in the long PC and LAN-café tradition of the post-Soviet space, and then in the free-to-play structure, the skins economy, and the competitive ecosystem. Low political legibility thus acts as one factor among others. The point that matters to the argument still holds. The friction between the Russian public and Western gaming is measured by the degree to which a product becomes legible as a hostile narrative, more than by its national origin.
Building the Response
The Russian patriotic catalogue emerges at the opposite extreme from Counter-Strike. Where the competitive engine lowers political legibility to the point of dissolving it, these titles maximize it and make national recognizability their very purpose. Smuta, a historical video game from 2024 funded through state programs for patriotic content, including those of the Institute for Internet Development, is the clearest example (3). Other projects follow a similar logic, with military-themed titles oriented toward a markedly contemporary imaginary. Sparta is a game inspired by the activities of a Russian private military company in Africa, with an evident reference to the Wagner Group (4, 5). Front Edge is a strategy game centered on a direct armed confrontation between Russia and the United States in Eastern Europe. Zemsky Sobor, by contrast, is an adventure that retraces the events closing the Time of Troubles and the role played by the Cossacks (6).
The infrastructural question is rarely posed when this catalogue is discussed, and yet it is decisive. State-funded patriotic content has to circulate somewhere, and after 2022 the Russian distribution stack has visibly bifurcated. Domestic alternatives such as VK Play have absorbed a growing share of nationally aligned releases, while access to the global storefronts that historically structured the Russian player base, Steam above all, has become more conditional, slowed by payment restrictions, partial delistings, and, in the acute phase of 2022, by the impossibility for Russian developers to receive payouts through ordinary channels, before Steam restored payments months later through foreign intermediaries. Smuta itself launched primarily on VK Play. Here lies the paradox. The ground on which Modern Warfare and Battlefield live is that of the global storefronts, and the Russian counter-narrative is losing it precisely as it tries to contest it. Within its borders the national stack secures it an audience. Outside, where the hostile image was born and continues to circulate, its reach contracts. Yet it is the outside that counts, because the asymmetry the project set out to correct is global, and it is not corrected by speaking only to those already persuaded at home.
From Content to Infrastructure
The example of Smuta brings into focus the strategic weight of engines and toolchains in contexts not fully aligned with the Western ecosystem. Smuta was developed in Unreal Engine 5, a proprietary engine owned by Epic Games, and therefore within a technical infrastructure governed by a US company and subject to specific conditions of access, updating, and licensing.
A product can be built to project a national imaginary and yet rest on external foundations, and when the actor is Russia the contradiction carries real weight. The intent to assert sovereignty through memory and identity coexists with dependence on a graphics engine, on updates, licenses, and a marketplace governed by others. After the invasion of Ukraine the contradiction became more visible. Epic suspended its commercial activities in Russia without fully closing access to the tools already available. The game was not switched off overnight, yet the external dependence emerged plainly even for observers less versed in geoeconomic dynamics.
For the Russian developers who work on Unreal, the engine is the environment within which the product takes shape, not a neutral tool. If the conditions of access change, if the marketplace narrows, if updates become uncertain or licenses more opaque, even a project built to sustain a national narrative discovers that it does not control its own technical base. This is where narrative sovereignty meets its material limit. In the language of platform political economy these studios are complementors of a US platform, suppliers tied to an ecosystem they do not govern, and their continuity depends on decisions over which they have no bargaining power.
Unreal does not operate solely as an entertainment engine. Epic also promotes its use in simulation and immersive training, and the engine powers military tools such as the SATIS small-arms trainer developed by Thales, a defense contractor from a NATO country (7). It thus operates as part of a dual-use stack that reinforces the strategic weight of software chokepoints, where the capacity to design, update, and govern infrastructure becomes a form of indirect political leverage (8).
For this reason Tencent's investment in Epic (9) should be handled with care, because it does not amount to direct control over Unreal, yet it signals that engines have become assets around which interests are organized that exceed the market for content. In contemporary gaming, power passes less and less through ownership of a franchise and more and more through the position occupied in the layers that make it possible to develop, update, and distribute a game. Unreal is one of these layers, and that choice indicates that creative infrastructure, and not only the finished product, is now part of the industry's strategic geography (10).
Conclusion
From another angle, and precisely because of these structural conditions that act above all as constraint, Russian action could be reduced to a passive response. In this version Russia would have chosen nothing, it would merely have suffered the sanctions, and the migration toward a domestic infrastructure would be the mechanical fallout of an exclusion decided elsewhere. The friction on Steam and the consolidation of VK Play would remain the imprint of a blow received, devoid of any intention.
The objection captures the constraint and misses the direction. Faced with narrowing access, Russia reinternalizes the medium rather than withdrawing from it. It funds aligned content, shifts distribution onto a national stack, treats the domestic ecosystem as a perimeter to be garrisoned. The contraction of global reach is the immediate cost, the construction of a sovereign infrastructure is the long-term stake. Russia accepts a smaller radius today in order not to depend tomorrow on the adversary's ground. The bet also has a more ambitious face, because a Russian title capable of breaking through toward 2030 could draw onto VK Play a part of the global gaming public, the part most indifferent to strategic implications and drawn only by the product, and in that case the defensive perimeter would begin to function as a pole of attraction.
On that ground the gap with the major global platforms remains evident, and in the short term VK Play does not compete. The real stake plays out further on, in the possibility that, in an increasingly fragmented market, an infrastructure born of necessity might accumulate enough content, users, and habits to become something more than a national shelter. There the limit of the Russian strategy is measured, in turning a dependence it suffered into a governable perimeter and then that perimeter into a lever of influence.
This move belongs to a wider repertoire. The American strategic lexicon, from Anthony Lake in 1994 to George W. Bush's axis of evil in 2002, gathered under the label of rogue state the actors that, placed under sanctions, converted imposed isolation into autonomy, and where they could, autonomy into leverage (16). The clearest precedent is Iran, which for decades has reworked its own exposure to external pressure into instruments of pressure of its own, from import substitution to the control it exercises over the Strait of Hormuz. The video-game version remains civilian and embryonic, far from Tehran's military chokepoint, and yet it follows the same grammar, because a chokepoint suffered can become, under the right conditions, a chokepoint wielded. This is the thread that ties infrastructural sovereignty to the capacity for projection, and the Russian video game shows it at an early stage.
Narrative sovereignty is not enough without control of the infrastructure that makes it possible.
Indicators to monitor
- Evolution of VK Play's content catalogue and user base, as a signal of whether the domestic stack is gaining critical mass or stabilizing as a national shelter.
- New state-funded patriotic titles and their distribution strategy: domestic only, or attempts at international reach through neutral platforms.
- Epic Games and Unreal Engine licensing conditions for Russian studios, and whether access restrictions harden or soften following geopolitical shifts.
- Tencent's role as a potential intermediary between Russian studios and Western toolchains, given its Epic stake and its track record of bridging sanctioned and non-sanctioned markets.
- Steam payment and payout conditions for Russian developers, which have already oscillated since 2022 and remain a proxy for broader platform governance intentions.
- Any Russian-developed title that achieves meaningful traction outside the domestic stack, as the first empirical test of the projection hypothesis outlined in the conclusion.
- Counter-Strike 2 player-base data for Russia, which functions as a real-time measure of how far low-legibility Western games remain permeable even under sanctions pressure.
- Emergence of alternative engine ecosystems with Russian participation, whether state-sponsored or through bilateral agreements with non-aligned actors.