Creating video games might seem trivial in times of war. But for many Ukrainians in this sector, it is a way of resisting. ” Working is a way for us to move forward”, says Irina, met on March 21 in Lyon, where she arrived a few days earlier with her yellow parrot. Whether in kyiv, when the bombs fell near her apartment, or during the exhausting days spent in buses traveling to Poland and then France, where she now lives in anguish for her relatives left behind, the manager of sales of the Frogwares studio says that it never completely ceased its activity.
The 35-year-old young woman was thus the linchpin of the online release on March 24 of an extension for the video game. Sherlock Holmes: Chapter One (2021) and the launch of pre-sales on the Nintendo Switch console of a previous title, Sherlock Holmes: The Devil’s Daughter (2016). A date that was not chosen at random: exactly one month earlier, the Russian invasion began. “Today, more than ever, we need to keep our studio alive and functional”, wrote that day Frogwares on social media.
A way for this structure, which has just under a hundred employees, to show that it is holding up. Irina esteems herself “lucky” to be able to work remotely, thanks to a computer and an Internet connection. With the conflict, a large part of his fellow citizens were deprived of a job.
Support channels
The video game industry is dynamic in Ukraine. Renowned training in IT and artistic disciplines, geographical proximity as well as lower wages than in Western Europe have contributed to making it a strategic area for the sector. The Ubisoft studios in kyiv and Odessa, for example, have a thousand employees. Gameloft, the French flagship of mobile games, employs more than 600 people, who were based in Lviv and Kharkiv. And beyond the video game giants, a myriad of smaller independent creators flourish there, such as Frogwares, founded in 2000 by French people.
Deserted since the outbreak of the war, the studios have been recomposed remotely. Internal communication platforms and messaging apps, like Telegram, serve as places of mutual support, says Gilles Langourieux, CEO of Virtuos, a Singapore-based service company that does outsourcing for major studios. through its various entities. Among them, the Volmi Games studio, in kyiv, bought in January 2022 and which has 140 people. “We found reflexes that we had taken with the Covid-19, from the first confinements. We try, several times a week, to make sure that people are still responding and to know how they are feeling,” details this Frenchman.
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