But also: What would be the point of open sourcing your engine so that a russian company can work on it or use it? If you are going to be doing back channel exchange of money to outsource improvements then that is a REAL good way to get your assets seized. And the commit history will be a good indication that something hinky is happening. And if you are going to back channel it you just give them a private FTP server or something.
I am not huge on warthunder so I can't really speak to the technology. It looks like it has some good scale capabilities though. So I could see this as being the first step to try and pull an "Unreal Engine" and branch out that way. Although, odds are this will be closer to a Cryengine.
My understanding is VK group is developing something on their engine.
Gaijin founders are Russian, they have major investors which are Russian, developers which are Russian.
While I'm not going to bet on it one way or another I would not be surprised if it was to avoid sanctions in order to keep contractual obligations / make Russian investors happy.
Why would taking a previously proprietary "asset" and making it open source make russian investors happy?
Because they are your investors?
And why are they happy that something they paid a lot of money for is now public?
A more likely, but imo still not realistic, theory I've just thought of is that this was done to reduce intl intelligence services trying to snoop on Gaijin devs because they think could be classified stuff in their source code.
This doesn't contain any of the actual game characteristics though, it's just the engine.
There have been some theories floating around that they did this to avoid sanctions so they can share code with related Russian companies.
That seems very unlikely to me.
Based on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hungary%E2%80%93Russia_relations#Hungary_and_the_Russian_Federation: Hungary has mostly remained neutral-to-favorable to russia while remaining part of NATO. So I suspect they don't have as strict export control laws as other NATO countries.
But also: What would be the point of open sourcing your engine so that a russian company can work on it or use it? If you are going to be doing back channel exchange of money to outsource improvements then that is a REAL good way to get your assets seized. And the commit history will be a good indication that something hinky is happening. And if you are going to back channel it you just give them a private FTP server or something.
I am not huge on warthunder so I can't really speak to the technology. It looks like it has some good scale capabilities though. So I could see this as being the first step to try and pull an "Unreal Engine" and branch out that way. Although, odds are this will be closer to a Cryengine.
My understanding is VK group is developing something on their engine.
Gaijin founders are Russian, they have major investors which are Russian, developers which are Russian.
While I'm not going to bet on it one way or another I would not be surprised if it was to avoid sanctions in order to keep contractual obligations / make Russian investors happy.
Why would taking a previously proprietary "asset" and making it open source make russian investors happy?
Because they are your investors?
And why are they happy that something they paid a lot of money for is now public?
A more likely, but imo still not realistic, theory I've just thought of is that this was done to reduce intl intelligence services trying to snoop on Gaijin devs because they think could be classified stuff in their source code.
This doesn't contain any of the actual game characteristics though, it's just the engine.