Russia Ukraine War Impact on Video Games Industry ft. Boris Kalmykov CEO Hypemasters

hello everybody and welcome as we all know the russia ukraine war has had a really dramatic impact on many people's lives and just to be clear i know most of you out there are not here to hear me talk about geopolitics in any way but i do think that there are a number of implications that this war has on not only society economy things like that various industries but on the gaming industry in particular so today i wanted to focus on that aspect of the war basically impact of the russia ukraine war ii game development and with more of a focus on mobile free-to-play because that's the the industry that i'm focused in but to help us understand this situation and a lot of the implications especially to those companies in russia and the ukraine we have with us today boris kalmikov did i pronounce your name your last name wow properly that's actually very good

i'm surprised that's very good yeah ceo of hype masters and boris just to give us a little bit of your background and to provide a little bit of street cred for you and to to allow the audience to understand why you have a particular insight into russia and ukraine could you tell us a little bit more about your background and kind of your company hype masters yeah sure uh so firstly i'd like to actually like to thank you joe for uh you know inviting me and speaking about this topic i know it's gonna be probably very controversial and probably gonna have a lot of comments but i think it's important to cover it i think it's important to kind of share like what people are going through and you know talk about it openly instead of you know the backstages or back doors where people are just you know whispering about it it's really cool to kind of face it face to face the issue and yeah if we talk about me i'm ethnically russian so i was born in moscow

but then when i was around 10 years old i moved to the uk so right now i live in the uk in hampshire actually in limington which is small uh you know sea town um not to get confused with lemington spa right no not to be confused with limington spa which is a different uh yeah it's different area different county i'm in hampshire in limington yeah um cool which is next to isle of wight um and yeah my career uh kind of started uh far away from gaming actually after university where i started international relations uh which is kind of the topic where which we are discussing um i went to goldman sachs and i was an analyst there for interest rate trade derivatives um which is like super far from gaming but then i got at one day you know i knew this wasn't for me and i got a report about war gaming and how much money they're making you know how big of a studio they are how big of a business they are i actually understood that gaming can be a good business and um you know it really struck me

because i am a passionate gamer from you know early days in russia where you know my neighborhood was super tough and the only thing i could do really safely is to play games so i was a world of warcraft fan and you know all the rts fan like i played starcraft and command and conquer red alert so this is kind of my childhood um and yeah then i just moved into games i started my career at unity um where i was helping devs uh with monetization and analytics efforts i worked with companies like clerix rovio you know wargaming all the major european guys actually helping them use unity tools and then i was doing a little bit of the same in facebook um kind of being one of their first like kind of gaming oriented sales people and from then i started hype masters and hype masters is a studio which basically brings in all my aspirations and games we are here to build legendary and genre defining games that players all over the world can play

for years i know that might sound familiar but you know this is the stuff that i'm actually excited about i really want to build a studio that is purposefully doing that and in terms of the composition uh hype masters is uh around 30 people right now uh and we are building uh a classic rts for mobile which you have seen you know last week at gdc i've shown you um and yeah and in terms of uh that's great by the way thank you thank you i'm keem to share with anyone who wants to so please put it in your comment like if you want a copy i'll send you a test flight so you can have a play um but yeah we are um the thing about our city is that obviously i've told you that i live in the uk but 80 of our people uh actually were based in russia until recently so we are attacked by this crisis quite heavily and uh yeah i want to share a little bit about it right and you also have investment from russian companies right or publishers

um we uh not as of now uh we actually yeah we are funded by uh one vc is from us the other one is from cyprus which is linked to russia but again it's legally a cypress company um the one the other one is turkish and the other one is finnish so we have a good composition of worldwide okay so getting into like the impact so you mentioned 80 of your company is in russia can you speak to like in in terms of like your company your situation your employees what has impact of the war been and what how and also just kind of like what is their mindset right now how are they thinking is this i can't imagine it's easy for anybody but it'd be great to get like you know first-hand account of like how this is impacting people yeah so first of all i just want to say that uh if we talk about toughness i think it's the toughest on ukrainian studios you know i have a lot of friends who run businesses in ukraine studios

like uh they are you know we share the same investors etc so they literally continue developing games whilst being bombarded which is pretty incredible so none of what i'm gonna say about my studio compares to that you know uh this is like physical danger for us it's more about you know psycho psychology and fears and some economic impact so in terms of our studio uh well obviously no one has expected anything like this to happen literally like i was visiting st petersburg in february i was reading bloomberg and i was like this is nuts like nothing like this would ever happen like russia is not the kind of state that would invade other states uh so openly but then it did happen and uh you know in the first week we had already one person leaving russia for turkey kind of saying that he you know he's fearful and he's anxious and that basically spread around really quickly so i would say that um majority of like our team is uh is

really anxious and fears about the future their future their relatives and you know their and again another one the big one is the perception of russians you know like it's all about um we keep hearing in the news that there's this culture of cancellation where basically a russian equals aggressor equals um equals putin kind of thing and that's the kind of the major fear is that you know we're so far away from it as game developers like like literally until like a a month ago i i hasn't i've never been reading politics for like you know since my degree um so now i'm kind of i'm kind of doing the same constantly reading about politics and uh for my team it's it's a lot of anxiety it's a lot of uh kind of uncertainty thankfully like for our company we've been able to you know support the team we've been able to pay them we've been able to help them with relocation but that's uh not every not every studio

can afford that i would say and we've been pretty lucky since we just have this connection with the west but yeah it's it's tough and most of it is psychological most of it is fierce and most of it is um you know perception of their future and perception of the future for for for them being russian in this world yeah right in terms of like the employees that you said were in russia you helped relocate them how many did opt for that option of relocating and where where did they go yeah so we have around 50 of our studio out of russia right now so you know we have i've just you know i'm sitting in the room in a conference room where i've met with my guys in turkey in istanbul and we had like nine people here today with me um we have more people in armenia and georgia so these are the countries where actually a lot of the russians moved to because these were the countries that were still open

for kind of to go to um as you know like all the a lot of the air traffic has been stopped between russia and europe so there were no there are no planes for flying between russia and let's say uk or spain or somewhere so people had limited choices in terms of where they could go they could either go to asia which is you know less politicized right now like they could go to malaysia or to dubai or they can could go closer to armenia georgia or turkey and obviously you know our team has has decided closer because it's closer to their relatives closer to me as a as a founder i could visit them quite easily in these countries um that's that's the situation and that's what's happening to a lot of studios you could see that you know i've been speaking to a lot of the developers a lot of founders and that's what happens to everyone right now like a lot of their people are in these three countries uh kind of concentrated there um right and continuing to work from these countries

for those russian employees who did choose to relocate what's the the motivation behind moving out of russia i mean obviously it's not like they're the ones starting the war but is it because of sanctions is it because of the potential to get you know maybe get enlisted into into a war or something like that or what's the primary motivation sure the primary motivation is a total uncertainty um so as i said before no one actually was expecting this word to happen so when it hit uh it kind of switched on the mindset oh anything can happen in this world you know so all the potential fears kind of went blue so oh can i get conscripted yeah sure and you know the government wasn't giving any good signs like we we had um you know some of the uh mps in russia which is like you know a congressman uh in the us they were basically suggesting that anyone who protests the war uh

would go to the front lines to donbass and you know this is pretty rough like if you consider like uh if you consider uh what's happening and so the people were the primary motivation was major uncertainty and fear of physical um either punishment or you know fear of not being able to choose what you do but for some people actually uh apart from that like primary motivation of just to survive and continue living a normal life uh it was also about like uh you know comfort of living because a lot of the western companies have been leaving russia uh or um you know uh all the major services actually linked to game development have uh not been able to continue operating like if we talk about adobe like photoshop the tool that every artist uses pretty much uh or if we talk about jetbrains and you know writer like also used by a lot of

the developers uh these companies have just not been able to continue offering licenses to russian um to russian companies and that gives a lot of problems you know you could vpn it you like you know a lot of the people are doing in china but that's a lot of hustle and if you also add to the fact that you know a lot of chip processors like amd and intel they've stopped shipping stuff to russia and samsung has stopped shipping phones um you know we are we are developers so we need test phones we need like uh we need computers and all this is like it's basically less available right now so to continue operating as a studio it just becomes tougher obviously with time everything will readjust and these products will flow through third countries like kazakhstan for example i can see a lot of this happening but it's just going to be harder more expensive and yeah a lot more hectic uh yeah then let's say if we were to be located in

the netherlands for example right and to your point about you mentioned there are some some russians anyway are concerned about the perception about them as people i will say so we actually at leela we employ you know one person in russia and you know we have a number of open job roles and he and you know when i talked to him once and he was like yeah the i know some folks here but they're russian so i'm like what are you talking about you know what i mean i i love people i love russians you know it's it's yeah and so i i think yeah to your point there may be a little bit of a perception that there's a stigma to russian people and i i really hope they understand that at least for someone like myself i mean i i view people as people and i think you know my my assumption would be the vast majority of the world thinks that way or that's my hope that that that's how most people would think but yeah i do think that that's unfortunate that um there may be to your point some people who think that there are some biases that

people have or even like resentment or something whereas you know i i at least speaking for myself and for a lot of people at our company we we just think about people as people yeah that's i think a really big takeaway from this podcast i think that's how it should continue you know like with especially our industry uh we're quite a young industry uh and we're quite a liberal industry and i think it should be like this you know ukrainians russians uh below russians you know um i i don't see a problem with people working together even after this you know drastic events um but people are people at the end of the day yeah yeah no i'm like we're we're crazy bastards i try to actually get some people from pakistan to that didn't quite work out but uh yeah um so maybe like one other question i could ask before i ask about specific companies you know more famous companies or bigger companies have been impacted by this is when you think about russia and ukraine what are the types of

when thinking about the game industry certainly there are certain regions that are really great at specific areas you know latin am has great artists for example you know canada has great more like triple a you know like high fidelity type of expertise but when you think about russia and ukraine what types of talent do you typically see and you know my my perception is like someone who doesn't know that much but you know i generally think about like shooters or war type of games so you know probably like kind of a game development but could you speak to that in terms of like tendencies of the talent in russia and ukraine yeah actually you know when i was uh preparing for our chat uh i was thinking that oh uh it's mobile uh free to play because we have playwrights you know we have a lot of talent from plarium we have nexters uh melsoft you know all these famous famous students but then i remember oh escape from tarkov as well is from russia or wargaming is also from you

know belarus yeah yeah so uh it's actually the town is quite widespread and um when i talk when i think about like the core competencies i would say the dev talent is definitely you know the developers who the in the unity developers or unreal developers the guys who code uh is the resource that a lot of the companies even when i was working at facebook you would see like a whatsapp team consisting like 50 of russian people um so it's the developers is the major talent you know and that's i think that's why you know if we talk about talent and you know shooter games and war games and multiplayer games these are i would say uh tougher games to make simply because multiplayer it requires really good thing it requires really good server connection that's the strength and the strength comes from the fact that you know still if we look at ussr there was a really strong mathematical school

in the region there were a lot of scientists um you know physicists and a lot of the companies actually sprawled from it you know if we talk about it everybody plays chess that's that's a misconception although when i was a school i was playing a lot of chess yeah yeah yeah i was trying to follow the stereotypes and when i was in the uk school i joined the chess club and uh yeah i was trying to be russian yeah i mean like from this technical schools uh we had um you know there's a big company called yandex it's basically google for russia uh the guys went from you know uh the physics uh school near physics university near moscow and that's where the talent is right now there are also a lot of uh you know growing talents in game design and art as well like there are a lot of outsourced studios in ukraine in russia who are serving major aaa developers

like ea or you know uh riot or who you name it um i i've seen a lot of artists working for these bigger companies right and so maybe now shifting to like these big companies you mentioned a few of them playwrx plarium and certainly some of these companies have i imagine employees in both countries so you gotta imagine that's a really really challenging situation my my belief would be that these companies that are in both geographies would naturally be seriously impacted but um what have you heard or how do you think these companies are being impacted yeah so just a disclaimer i'm not linked to this company so i'm just going to talk rumors uh which is what this uh this is about i love rumors yeah this is all about rumors right so not nothing factual just rumors um but any big company is actually linked to

all three countries right war gaming has huge offices in minsk uh in kiev and in moscow and saint petersburg um clerics is the same uh from what i've heard they have like thousand five hundred employees in ukraine thousand five hundred in russia a few hundred in belarus so all these companies actually draw from talent pools in all these countries and uh you know so far from what i've been hearing well firstly all these companies are trying to help and relocate as many people as they can there are restrictions to what they can do obviously because in ukraine if you are a man you cannot live the country you you have to stay and you know uh because it's literally a military mobilization there um but you know women and children can leave and i think that's where these companies are helping the most um so there's a lot of effort and i think the whole region is kind of concentrated on helping their people which is really cool to see you know everyone goes back to basics where human you know we should

you know work this out we should uh you know leave this but obviously uh on the rumor side obviously there is a lot of pressure um you know because if you are imagine if you are ukrainian being bombarded you which it's the worst situation that could have been yeah uh highly important to you and your life yes super emotional and i see a lot of my even friends and people who i follow on like facebook and instagram they get super emotional uh they get you know they post every day about the situation and i totally can understand that and obviously they are putting a lot of pressure on their executives to kind of speak up against the war and speak up um against what's happening i think uh they you know it's fair that they're they're doing it but um at the other end if executives speak up they put in danger all the you know thousands of employees in russia because imagine if you're a politics and you speak up and you have 2 000 people there and the government has been uh you know

unpredictable by this point like we do not know what to expect we don't know whether to expect support or you know something else like um right so they don't want to certainly like right and certainly a lot of the employees in russia through no fault of their own or even even us in the u.s what we hear in terms of the media and what's actually going on i mean everyone is living in a different kind of context of what right versus wrong is and you know i and and so you could have very divergent opinions through no one's i would say no one's particular fault just because of like what you're hearing and how you're understanding the situation which may come from a completely different context whether in the i and i think that's one of the faults that we have in the west is we have like this very western like no this is the right way this is exactly how it should be but you know i think we should also understand that different people in different countries with different contexts might have different opinions

and then in this in a war case things can get very emotional things get very much imaginable there's a lot of propaganda on every single side and you know every side yeah and as far as as far as a business person entrepreneur i actually i just wrote a piece about it today about my principles of um uh you know crisis management i try to stay apolitical i do not judge any side simply because i do not know the facts i i'm not on the ground i'm not here to judge i'm here to help my people uh to get out of any situation they are in and i think that's what like a lot of these big companies are taking um but yeah it's increasingly difficult and i i can imagine like people you know privately being very political about you know about what's happening and obviously that creates internal divisions in studios or between people or between teams but hey just for the audience i'll i'll put a link to your what to the paper that you

wrote or the the post that you wrote in in the show notes so if you're in the audience be sure to check that out i will definitely read it as well myself it's in english as well it's my first piece of meaning i've been writing in russian before yeah all right cool so i i think um in terms of like other impacts i thought we could talk about some of the other potential disruptions you know we certainly have sanctions you know it was really difficult and by the way thank you so much boris you know so at lila we do have someone in russia it was a pain in the ass to try to get him paid right it's like no this bank doesn't work this paint doesn't work this thing doesn't work he's like ah does it work for you yeah it did yeah i was able to to get it through but um and and yeah and again thank you so much for you know for helping me out and giving me advice and stuff like that but in terms of like potential disruptions and we we have the current sanctions that you mentioned are

you mentioned already in terms of like certain ships not being sent to russia maybe the inability access equipment in russia but and just to be clear i'm pretty i'm like you i try to be apolitical i try to not have an opinion on sanctions or not but i mean these are real so could you talk more about like you know some of the potential impacts in in terms of you know if the if the war gets drawn out what do you think could happen in terms of whether it's additional disruptions or additional sanctions and where how do you think this plays out and by the way um just just for the audience i i think that at least from my side and i'm not even you know in russia we have you know one kind of person working with us in russia but like you know i try to apply for a silicon valley bank bank account application and then we're like oh i was like what is this like all this disclosure who are all my stakeholders are they related to russia

and i'm just like oh my god you know like all this paperwork all this stuff so you could tell like a lot of the banks are really like getting laser focused in on on the sinks and stuff and so i'm just a little bit concerned about where this could potentially go but i don't know do you have any thoughts on that boris yeah sure uh so in terms of sanctions obviously uh the biggest sector that has been hit is banking and you know we've talked about uh we've talked a little bit about it but i just want to expand a little bit further as well because it's actually a huge problem um you know as far as sanctions go actually only a few entities are sanctioned but a lot of the banks have been quite liberal in terms of stopping all transactions with russia simply for reasons that i do not understand um maybe they don't have a big compliance team maybe they just want to stay out of the region but even like uh our bank in

the uk revolut it's founded by a russian guy and a ukrainian guy and you know they stopped all transactions to russia and i know they have a team there a huge team there it's actually their biggest death center as far as i know um which is kind of like uh what is happening right so i think um it's again for banks i think it's a lot of uncertainty it's a lot more work so that's why you know they need to make sure that they adhere to sanctions otherwise they might get penalized by the government and you know from my times with goldman sachs i know that you know especially big banks they take it very seriously so um any any kind of hint towards this being linked to a sanctioned entity will stop trade completely um so i think that's very important and you know some banks are still continuing doing business with russia and i'm really thankful for that because we can continue operating um

but yeah this is kind of the biggest field and it not only concerns businesses sending money to businesses it concerns people being able to uh you know withdraw money so for example visa and mastercard they said basically that russian people cannot use uh visa mastercard overseas so my guys in turkey when they came here uh you know they couldn't use their bank cards which is like crazy um i i'm glad that uh russia created its own payment system and you know it's accepted in turkey which is like a miracle you know that it actually happened um but yeah this is like the biggest uh the biggest thing i would say the other major um thing with regards to sanctions it's linked closer to risks um and people being more cautious actually you know again all this chip's been withdrawn it's nothing to do with sanctions it's companies uh taking a position um so they just want to disassociate themselves with the market with the

government but they don't want to be present there um for this or that reason maybe they have logistical issues like some car automakers they didn't stop because you know they were sanctioned or they wanted to stop business but it's just because it became increasingly difficult logistically to to send their products um i i think it's a lot more like uh what we when we talk about sanctions it's actually a lot more about risks a risk for your business risk for you dealing with the russian and you like people and companies being cautious um let's take an example of like let's say an investor vc looking to invest in a gaming studio um you know the one of the risks that they have to consider now is whether the company has a you know a risk of the majority of their developers being shut down in the country is similar to north korea you know um and that's kind of uh that's kind of what stops a lot of the deals right now i i hear in the industry

is that because uh you know ukraine and russia there's a war there's so much uncertainty and they just don't want to associate themselves and putting themselves into the risk where you put 10 million in the company and it cannot operate for a year let's say or it has to spend like half of this money on relocating people um this is uh this is kind of the major thing uh in terms of you know sanctions and effects of the whole like community um being like withdrawing from russia obviously uh that that's kind of in terms of where i see this is going um i'm an optimist by nature i think you know as an entrepreneur you have to be an optimist otherwise why the hell do you start a business you would think it would shut down tomorrow um yeah so so so i'm an optimist and i think you know hopefully this conflict will be over soon um and as far as i see i think a lot of the companies um gradually will start coming back but

i you know i think a lot of the people are still going to be concerned about russian governments and its leadership and it's going to be a slow process it's not going to be like instantaneous ah okay russia stopped world let's go back it's going to be like step by step you know going back into the market and by the time it happens you'll have a whole load of chinese companies invading russian market because that's what literally the chinese ambassador in moscow said hey chinese entrepreneurs there's so much opportunity look at these companies withdrawing like open up now [Laughter] so it potentially you know like it's gonna be a different world right now where russia's uh you know its focus is definitely gonna be more to the east for at least you know a few years and um that's that's going to be like uh another country completely before that it was really you know western if you visit moscow in sir petersburg it's really developed really western um now it's probably going to be a lot more you

know um you know i think people like losing their jobs things shutting down and then new economy emerging from like different areas of the world right and speaking to your point about like businesses exiting and you know maybe some chinese entrepreneurs trying to move in and things like that one of the topics that has come up from time to time especially when trump was present in the us was this notion of splinternet meaning you know that there would be kind of a geographical um kind of you know geographical kind of separation where you know for example in india you know a number of chinese games and apps have been blocked including like green free fire pub g was blocked in china a lot of you know us games and apps are are blocked in if sanctions go further do you have any specific thoughts in terms of splinternet do you think it happens does that open up opportunities

for game developers in any way and we have seen that to your point about voluntary kind of sanctions we have seen a number of game companies that have kind of exited right like i or have kind of stopped their games being distributed in in russia but wondering if you have any thoughts on that yeah um sure um so in a sense splinternet has been happening in russia for a bit now right so i've mentioned there's a local google which is yandex uh and it's actually quite a powerful engine and it really rivals google in the market and you know this particular company yandex they have their own taxi services they and they actually acquired uber local uber which is funny usually uber is the one acquiring companies um so in russia splinternet has existed for for a bit um not to the same sense as china but i think it might move towards the same direction where you know like content

will be needed to be approved by the government and i can totally see it happening uh to be honest with you and in terms of the opportunities uh for developers i think um to be honest with you russia is a much smaller market than china and splinternet can only work only to to a point right it cannot be to the same magnitude you can you can't have um tencent growing out of russian market because it's simply much smaller um you can have local companies like creating games for local communities and there are some big gaming companies again which have like their biggest audiences in russia like for example wargaming and world of tanks this is a good example of a company that basically exists in the russian market and is this is their main audience and this is their main playing audience um but it can only go so far uh it's not it's never going to be the same

as big as china and for some of the companies it's never going to create the same you know economics you wouldn't have you wouldn't have a possibility to build the same kind of services for example like uh you probably won't have local messenger it will never become like super popular um like wechat right you have telegram which is also created by a russian dude pavel durov um but he is a much more like he's an international guy now like he i think he lives in dubai and he's been running company outside of russia for a long time now um so there's definitely going to be a lot less opportunity um there there are definitely going to be companies uh i don't know what you've heard but spare bank like the biggest bank in russia they've launched their gaming division and they are focusing on a particular market russian market um okay so they're definitely going to move in but yeah i i don't imagine that to be huge right although i would say like maybe the the other the flip side of the splinter

net is like russian companies going out but i mean to the point about maybe from a organ legal entity perspective there might be like russian companies that are either organized in like ireland or cyprus or something like that i would say 90 of russian companies are organized in this way already so okay so there may be some issues about you know blocking the quote-unquote russian company because they may be organized somewhere else but that would probably to your point it'd probably be that would be the bigger impact if there was a splinter net if those companies were blocked from exporting to other markets rather than kind of importing it into russia yeah i mean um yeah to this point like uh you know a majority of the companies who are operating globally they have headquarters elsewhere like they don't have headquarters in russia uh and this happens because um you know there are certain uh laws in russia which literally prevent you from

operating on the global scale like for example there was a vat on doing ua so if you want to spend a marketing dollar on facebook you'd have to pay 20 to the government which is nonsense you know given the economies of free to play so that's why a lot of the companies have already moved out like before and uh to the point of uh you know even if these companies have headquarters elsewhere they still might be banned from operating in the west totally you've seen um you know nexters a big company with their title hero wars uh they had us back ipo last year um and they were deleted recently even though like they have a lot of the presence in cyprus which is part of european union yeah so i think for a lot of the companies now it's kind of a strategic initiative to move a lot of their people to other countries so the exposure to russia or being tagged as russian is reduced right yeah i mean similar to like c getting blocked from india even though they're not really a chinese company but yeah they had some investment from 10 cent

and it's like oh we're going to block them anyway yeah yeah yeah this can happen okay so me maybe like um a final set of questions i could ask you is more about like the future outlook and certainly like you know um the wars continuing and and you know i totally agree with you i hate war love people hopefully this thing resolves soon but in terms of like the potential implications and fallout just from what we've already seen um how do you think about well maybe we could start with like the people like given all that's happened like in people already being even if you move them to let's say istanbul or somewhere in turkey or wherever like if you brought russians and ukrainians together um what is the where are people's minds at like is it is it is there going to be some you know and again completely understood but like if would there be

the potential for them to work together or what how do you view that just given what's what's happened i've been actually interviewing a ukrainian guy today who is right now involved involved and he knows that like 80 percent of our guys are in you know our russian so actually i don't think there is a you know i don't think there's all obviously going to be extremes right there's always going to be people on the extreme side of things but i don't see um given that you know game dev is a liberal community um against usually against the war you know usually up for making games that might be about four but this is you know better play than do um so i i don't think there's going to be a lot of problems in that sense obviously um you know uh ukrainian people are not gonna probably go to live in russia and uh you know vice versa i think that's gonna be kind of impossible uh given that uh you know apart from game development community there's a whole

bunch of people who for example support war for some reason or another um and i think it's this like you know intermingling between nations is definitely going to be put on hold um unfortunately and this is really sad because i know a lot of businesses have you know close links we all have relatives like you know i'm part bill russian ethnically i'm i have some you know i have some bulgarian blood in me so i have some finnish blood in me this is like this is this region is really interlinked um and it's it's going to stop it's it's it's not going to be the same way for i would say many years it's going to be a slow process of rebuilding trust um if ever it will be rebuilt you know um but it's a possibility that you know russians and ukrainians work together you know in a location like you know istanbul or czech republic or london and that's what's already happening right and when we meet there we all know we are people we have the same goals we you know people are people as you say um

so that's kind of where i see the industry going like obviously with companies putting their strategic efforts into opening offices somewhere in europe uh they would transfer people from ukraine and from russia to these locations and i think people will be happy working with each other um this is this is basic humanity you know we're not gonna i i don't i i don't believe that people will uh hold a grudge or like you know go against one another saying oh you're a bastard or you're a bastard yeah right yeah i i am with you and i have the very same hopes that people can see through all that stuff and you know basically treat each other humanely but um so maybe the last question i have is like given all that's happened in terms of the future outlook for game development in russia in the ukraine is it gonna disperse out to other countries like turkey poland wherever

or how do you see the general outlook from your perspective there are two two scenarios that can happen uh i would say uh first scenario is that there is a government change in russia and then uh you know everything changes drastically once again and uh the no perception of russia changes in the world that's always a possibility although i i would say it's quite low percentage given the amount of security the government has and the amount of support it has by the people the second possibility is the realistic one 97 is that all these companies who can afford it will move out and will continue operating on a much more global scale so if you take my studio for example you know i was planning to make it international with our series b to you know open offices in europe in america because you know i realized that there is a power in terms of uh cultural interaction uh peeping from people from different backgrounds interacting with

each other and creating something beautiful this has to be fast forward this has to this has to happen now not in my lofty future dreams where we have like already uh you know a few life games in production uh so so this is what's gonna happen i think a lot of the studios are going to you know centrally relocate because so far it has been kind of um more like financial support so if you feel that you are uncomfortable we would give you money to kind of relocate to a place where you feel more comfortable whereas if you look into this strategic aspect of it is that yes studios are looking into where is it good to establish a you know a permanent presence where can we get people to apply for visas where is it cost effective to hold the majority of people where is it cost effective um to kind of hold the executive level et cetera et cetera so this is the questions that every single executive is asking themselves and i've been speaking to a lot of them recently um

and this is what's on our minds it's like okay where is now a permanent base for hype masters for you know other companies uh um yeah this is our future where i think a lot of the people are gonna be uh less associated with russia unfortunately got it okay well for our audience you you heard boris if you are in russia or the ukraine please do apply i'll leave boris's contact information in the show notes and for anyone out there in russia or ukraine if you want to come work for fps shooter company in india you can contact me but uh i i think that's all the questions i have boris if do you have any sort of like um you know final message or any any other any other thoughts to tell the audience uh my final message just uh you know if you're an executive please continue to support your people and need to assist with relocation and payments and you know uh if you're an investor do

not cancel on deals or you know uh unfollow on what you have promised to your companies things are going to work out uh things are going to get back to normal because they always do like war has never been you know a persistent mode of people it's war peace war peace and hopefully peace will be achieved soon and you know continue to being be a person a kind person a good person no matter who you're facing um and yeah it's all this hard to come by nowadays and it's important to you know realize that preserving this talent is important like never before and you know if you have russian employees if you have ukrainian employees and below russian employees try to try to keep them and try to help them right okay boris thank you so much for all of your insights all of your thoughts i definitely wish you great luck on your game from what i saw it looked really good and so with that to our audience we'll catch you next time thanks thank you

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