69% of Russian players hack after Ukrainian invasion pushback

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Russian gamers were not introduced to hacking by the aftermath of their country's invasion of Ukraine, far from it. But piracy is escalating and likely won't be backing down any time soon.

This is according to a survey conducted by Russian game development training platform School XYZ, covering the whole country and all game formats. Sixty-nine percent of gamers surveyed said they had played at least one copy of a pirated game in 2022, while 51% said they pirated more games now than they did in 2021.

Piracy as a whole may be on the rise, but the enthusiasm and motivations differ somewhat. About 20% of respondents said they had hacked more than 10 games, and 27% had caught at least three in 2022. But 31% said they hadn't hacked anything, and almost as many said they were opposed to piracy. And only 7% said they hadn't purchased anything through official channels, suggesting that 93% of Russian gamers surveyed, even known hackers, had purchased at least something in the last year.

The survey (spotted by TorrentFreak) points to a broadening of Russian game piracy, not necessarily a deepening. The Office of the U.S. Trade Representative said in 2013 that Russia "dominated the field as the far-reaching leader in peer-to-peer piracy" of games. A 2019 survey by security firm ESET found that out of 2,000 Russians, 91% preferred pirated content across all media, pirated games were the most popular pirated content, and only 9% of respondents purchased content exclusively from official sources. The survey did not cover those who both purchased and pirated content.

One of the reasons Russian enthusiasm for piracy may be growing is that there aren't many opportunities left for legitimate content. After Ukraine called on all video game companies to block Russian and Belarusian accounts in early March 2022, large numbers followed suit. CD Projekt Red was the first to react, followed soon after by Microsoft, then Ubisoft, Take-Two, EA, Activision and Epic. Sony and Nintendo joined Microsoft soon after. This was compounded by the suspension of services by MasterCard and Visa, then by PayPal, while Google and Nintendo have also since halted payments in their app stores.

The pushback and releases from Russia have also affected game developers. Russian publication Kommersant (translated) suggests that, based on data from a Russian job board, job vacancies among game developers in Russia fell by almost 40% in the first half of 2022. A good number of them are likely to come from non-Russian studios that left after Russia invaded Ukraine.