Ukrainian Deputy Prime Minister and Head of the Ministry of Digital Development Mikhail Fedorov wanted to limit the sale of the video game Atomic Heart, developed by the Russian studio Munfish. He announced this on Twitter.
The world’s largest game stores Steam published pictures of his calls to Microsoft and Sony with calls to ban the sale of the game on these sites.
“I believe none of these platforms support the bloody regime, the murders, and the romanticization of communism. The use of the gaming industry is a whole new level of Russian propaganda,” Fedorov wrote.
In one of these letters, the Ukrainian minister addresses Gabe Newell, the founder and chairman of Valve (owner of the Steam video game store), where he talks about concerns about Atomic Heart.
“According to our information, the above game was developed by the Russian studio Mundfish. Since Fedorov, management and offices are located in Russia, there is a risk that the proceeds from the purchase of the game will be transferred to the Russian budget and used to finance the war against Ukraine,” Fedorov explains in the letter.
According to him, another reason for banning the game is its theme (environment) as well as the propaganda of communist regime and Soviet symbols.
“I think Valve doesn’t want to be seen as a platform that supports communism, even in such a futuristic version. The history of Soviet Russia and its imperialist attacks on other independent countries resulted in the massacre of hundreds of thousands of civilians…
In light of the foregoing, we strongly urge Valve Corporation to ban the sale of digital copies of this game through Steam,” the minister wrote.
He also stressed that the developers of the game did not openly express their position regarding the Russian authorities and the special operation in Ukraine.
Atomic Heart is a first-person shooter released on February 21, 2023. The video game is set in an alternate reality of the 1950s, when the USSR made a technological breakthrough in robotics. The play is full of Soviet equipment and references to famous literary, cinematic and musical works of those years.
The game received generally positive reviews from both critics and the gaming community upon release. In Russia, it is distributed only through the VK Play store (final owners are Sogaz and Gazprombank). In other countries, Steam is available for purchase on the PS Store (for PC and Xbox) as of the version included in the Game Pass subscription from Microsoft.
But even before Atomic Heart was released, they actively tried to “cancel” it in different countries. The main initiators of the ban on games in August 2022 were initially Ukrainian Internet users, pro-Ukrainian thematic portals and Telegram channels. The main reason for this was that the developers from the Mundfish company did not specify their position on the special ops.
In this context, fountains began to appear in various foreign segments of the Internet, where Mundfish is a propaganda product allegedly supporting SVO and developed with the game “bloody Russian gas money”. Some anti-Russian developers from other well-known studios also joined the campaign against Atomic Heart.
The second wave of “cancellations” began in January 2023, just before its release, when pro-Ukrainian activists began calling on social networks to cancel pre-orders for the game. Users also wrote a letter to Microsoft demanding that they stop funding Atomic Heart.
Opponents of the video game went through its content after its release. The episode at the beginning of the game, in which a flying robot drone carries a pot of geranium in its claws, was most hated by viewers who supported Ukraine – it was taken as a reference to the actively used Russian Sardinia-2 kamikaze drones. Used during NWO.
Attention was also paid to the jars of minced meat in the colors of the Ukrainian flag, located in the shooter (such a product with such a design was originally produced in the USSR).
Anti-game users called SJW activists to their side, stating that Atomic Heart objectified female characters. In Western reviews, you can find claims that there is no dark-skinned hero in the shooter. Ukrainians were also outraged by the hairstyles of some of the most memorable characters who pretended to be rivals to the faceless twin robots called Right and Left. They wrap braids around their heads, like the former Prime Minister of Ukraine Yulia Tymoshenko.
Even Russian officials noted attempts to cancel the game: Rossotrudnichestvo noted that it is now very fashionable in Western society to “poison” cultural phenomena that give even the slightest reason to be proud of Russia or the USSR.