69% of Russian gamers are pirating after Ukraine invasion pushback

Russian gamers were not introduced to piracy by the backlash to their country’s invasion of Ukraine—far from it. But piracy is ramping up, and it likely won’t back down any time soon.

That’s the takeaway from a survey by Russian game development training platform School XYZ, covering the whole country and all game formats. Sixty-nine percent of gamers surveyed said they’d played at least one pirated game copy in 2022, while 51 percent said they’re pirating more games now than they did in 2021.

Piracy as a whole may be up, but enthusiasm and motivations differ somewhat. Roughly 20 percent of those surveyed said they had pirated more than 10 games, and 27 percent had grabbed at least three in 2022. But 31 percent said they had pirated nothing, and nearly the same responded that they were opposed to piracy. And only 7 percent said they had not purchased anything through official channels, suggesting that 93 percent of surveyed Russian gamers, even admitted pirates, had bought at least something last year.

The survey (spotted by TorrentFreak) points to a widening of Russian game piracy, not necessarily a deepening. The Office of the US Trade Representative said back in 2013 that Russia was “dominating the field as the far-and-away leader in peer-to-peer piracy” of games. A 2019 survey by security firm ESET found that among 2,000 Russians, 91 percent preferred pirated content across mediums, that cracked games were the most popular pirated content, and that just 9 percent of respondents bought content exclusively from official sources. The survey did not cover those who both purchased and pirated content.

One reason Russian enthusiasm for piracy may be increasing is that there aren’t many avenues left for legitimate content. After Ukraine called on all game companies to block Russian and Belorussian accounts in early March 2022, a large number followed through. CD Projekt Red was early to respond, followed soon after by Microsoft, then Ubisoft, Take-Two, EA, Activision, and Epic. Sony and Nintendo joined Microsoft soon after. This was compounded by MasterCard and Visa suspending services, then PayPal, while Google and Nintendo have also since shut off payments in their app stores.

Pushback and exits from Russia have hit game developers, too. Russian publication Kommersant (translated) suggests that, based on data from a Russian jobs site, vacancies at game developers in Russia decreased by almost 40 percent in the first half of 2022. A good number of those likely come from non-Russian-based studios departing after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.