Imagine an industry that generates hundreds of millions of dollars in foreign exchange earnings for a country, shapes its image for more than 770 million users worldwide, and, during times of war, also trains combat drone pilots. Imagine that this industry does not have any systemic support from the state.

ZN. UA tells why Ukrainian game development is a story about how you can build a global brand not thanks to, but despite, government policy.

From outsourcing to your own universes.

In 1993, the Kiev studio Meridian’93 released the first commercial Ukrainian game Admiral Sea Battles. More than 30 years have passed since that time - and during this time the industry has turned into potentially one of the most effective tools of cultural diplomacy, although Ukraine itself realized this only after the start of a full-scale invasion. The audience of games created by Ukrainian developers exceeds 770 million users, and the industry employs over 20 thousand people.

In 2001, when GSC Game World released the strategy game Cossacks: European Wars, it demonstrated to the world the ability of Ukrainian studios to compete in the global market. But the real breakthrough was the S series. , the first part of which was released in 2007. This project not only received cult status - it turned the Chernobyl zone into a recognizable Ukrainian cultural topos, speaking a language understandable to hundreds of millions of people.

GSC Game World is a family company. It was founded in 1995 by 16-year-old Kiev resident Sergei Grigorovich, the abbreviation GSC is the initials of his name in Latin transliteration.

In 2011, Grigorovich Sr. unexpectedly closed the studio and stopped development of S. 2, but already at the end of 2014 his younger brother Evgeniy Grigorovich restarted the company and headed it as CEO and game director. It was under his leadership - with the support of creative director Maria Grigorovich - S. 2: Heart of Chornobyl reached release in November 2024, despite the war, evacuation and postponement of the release date.

2: The Heart of Chernobyl - Release Trailer.

In April 2026, Sergei Grigorovich finally announced his break with GSC and the S franchise. and announced his new project - S. Bermuda S.O.S.. At the same time, GSC, under the leadership of Evgeny Grigorovich and investor Maxim Krippa, is preparing two DLCs (additional content for the video game) and is in negotiations with Netflix about a film adaptation.

However, GSC is not the only tree that has sprouted from a common root. Even earlier, former studio employees founded 4A Games and created the Metro series - a game re-interpretation of the novels of the Russian writer Dmitry Glukhovsky (who, however, condemned the war and is wanted in the Russian Federation).

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For a long time, Ukrainian game development remained predominantly an outsourcing industry: Ukrainian studios painted textures, modeled characters and wrote code for Western publishers.

Room 8 Group, Pingle Game Studio, Innovecs Games showed the fastest growth among 25 industry leaders. Now Ukraine is gradually moving from a service model to the creation of its own cultural “universes”, which become the hallmark of the country.

Case S. 2: million copies in 48 hours.

On November 20, 2024, GSC Game World released S. 2: Heart of Chornobyl. The game sold a million copies in 48 hours, and even more players joined via Xbox Game Pass. On the digital distribution service Steam, peak online exceeded 121 thousand concurrent players.

The game's gross revenue on Steam alone is estimated to have reached around $67 million.. already in the first four days of sales. GSC owner Maxim Krippa confirmed that the project paid for itself in less than a month after its release - with an estimated development budget of “tens of millions of dollars”. Steam enabled S. 2 on the platinum list of new releases of the year based on gross revenue in the first two weeks of release, along with Warhammer 40K: Space Marine 2 and Call of Duty: Black Ops 6.

The Ukrainian studio, which worked under rocket fire, was forced to evacuate part of the team and postponed the release date several times, finally created a product that competes with the most expensive projects on the planet. As Crippa noted: “This is not only a commercial achievement, but also a huge cultural achievement.”.

Frogwares case.

The Frogwares studio, which since 2002 has created games based on the works of Arthur Conan Doyle and Howard Lovecraft, found itself at the epicenter of events on February 24, 2022: the company’s headquarters are located in Kyiv. Some workers joined the Armed Forces of Ukraine or joined the volunteer movement, others were forced to evacuate. Production processes were virtually paralyzed.

The situation was partially stabilized thanks to a grant from Epic Games, which made it possible to relocate part of the team to safer regions. The studio announced the new project with the statement: “This is our middle finger to those who thought they could just break into our country.”. In April 2022, development began on a remake of Sherlock Holmes: The Awakened, funded through Kickstarter - the company raised the required amount in a matter of hours.

The game was released in April 2023 with a dedication: “To all soldiers, volunteers, everyone who helps them, and in general to all the people who support our country on their shoulders.”. Frogwares is currently working on The Sinking City 2, the release of which has been postponed to the first half of 2026 - again due to war-related challenges.

Gamedev at the front: from game engines to combat simulators.

Gaming technologies have also become a tool of defense. The most striking example is Ukrainian Fight Drone Simulator (UFDS), created by Simtech Solutions. This FPV drone simulator, built on real combat data, was used exclusively for military training for more than two years before it became publicly available on Steam in December 2025.

According to the developers, over 5 thousand pilots trained with the help of UFDS carried out more than 100 thousand precision combat strikes. The simulator takes into account the radio horizon, the influence of electronic warfare, signal delays and even complete loss of video - conditions that operators face in real combat.

In parallel, the FPV Battleground startup created its own simulator using the Unity engine, which was bought more than 10 thousand times, with half of the users being foreign. Military get free keys. Ukraine has actually become the first country in the world where gaming technologies are massively integrated into military training.

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It is also worth recalling the “Drone Army” system, which the then Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Digital Transformation (now the Minister of Defense) Mikhail Fedorov described as a gamified platform: military units receive points for confirmed defeats and exchange them for new weapons through the Brave1 platform. Hundreds of drone units are already involved in this system. Gamification of war is a real operational mechanism.

Cultural diplomacy through pixels.

At the Devcom-2025 conference in Cologne, researcher Yaroslav Kot presented the concept of “games of war” - Ukrainian game projects that go far beyond the boundaries of entertainment. According to him, these projects are tools for therapy, education, artistic expression, fundraising and countering propaganda..

The University of Gdansk launched the annual Games of War conference and opened a bachelor's program in historical game design. European Historical Game Studies Journal is preparing a special issue dedicated to Ukrainian war games. The disappearance of these games, Kot warns, will mean the loss of important evidence of the multi-vector nature of this war - especially since the Russian side is waging coordinated mass complaint campaigns to remove Ukrainian projects from platforms.

Against S. 2, a review bombing campaign was launched, where Russian players were offered to write negative reviews for 5 rubles for every 200 views. In addition, as part of the disinformation operation, a fake was distributed, allegedly S. 2 collects player data for the mobilization needs of the Ukrainian government - this campaign is associated with the Russian operation “Matryoshka”. And already in 2025-2026, the situation reached a new level: the game Squad 22: ZOV appeared on Steam, created with the participation of Russian veterans and officially recommended for training cadets and the Yunarmiya.; The Ministry of Digital Development wrote an official appeal to Valve demanding that this product be removed as a tool of military propaganda..

In March 2026, another game appeared on the platform - Ukrainian Warfare: Gostomel Heroes from the Russian studio Cats Who Play, which glorifies the landing on Gostomel, and the Ukrainian community organized a massive complaint campaign on Steam. The Polish think tank NASK identified propaganda elements in these products that correspond to Russian state messaging narratives.

Mobilization, taxes and the illusion of support.

Exports of Ukrainian IT services in 2025, according to the Lviv IT Cluster (with reference to the NBU), amounted to $6.66 billion. — and gamedev is part of this ecosystem both in the service (outsource) and product segments. At the same time, the domestic gaming market, according to Statista, is estimated at $577 million. (2024) - Ukrainians themselves spend so much on games. At the same time, almost 90% of Ukrainian studios are financed independently, without government support.

According to DOU, during the last reporting period the industry lost more than 1,020 jobs in the first half of the year, representing a reduction of almost 12%.. Investments were almost completely frozen, some Ukrainian venture funds withdrew proposals, and foreign partners began to transfer projects from Ukraine due to uncertainty, blackouts and risks of mobilizing key specialists.

Let's analyze the key problems.

Mobilization of developers. According to dev. ua, the situation with reservations in large IT companies is complicated. EPAM employed 500 specialists as of June 2025. In Ciklum, out of 2000 specialists in Ukraine, only 39 are reserved, and 99 serve in the Armed Forces of Ukraine. Sigma Software has 95 people with reservations, and 46 serve. A quota of 50% of the total number of military personnel remains insufficient to protect critical specialists.

At the same time, a significant part of IT specialists work as individual entrepreneurs or on gig contracts (61.82 and 14.41%, respectively), and these categories are generally not subject to booking. This means that the vast majority of game developers working as freelancers or as individual entrepreneurs remain unprotected from mobilization.

Lack of system policy. Unlike the military-industrial complex, which received the right to reserve up to 100% of workers, the gaming industry does not have a special status. The state does not recognize game development as a critical industry - despite the fact that it generates foreign exchange earnings, pays taxes and provides technology for defense. In Ukraine there is no analogue of the Polish GameINN program, Canadian tax credits or French credit d'impot jeu video.

According to the NAGS, as of the first quarter of 2025, 156,792 civil servants worked in Ukraine, of which only 4,401 people were mobilized - that is, less than 3%. If we count more broadly (all state employees), then their total number, according to CASE Ukraine estimates, exceeds 5.5 million people. At the same time, at the end of 2025, the actual number of civil servants decreased by only 5.1 thousand - that is, by 3%. At the same time, the gaming industry with its 20 thousand employees lost over 1020 positions in the first half of the year - 12%. An industry that generates billions of dollars in foreign exchange earnings is bleeding three times faster than the state apparatus distributing these billions..

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Personnel churn and relocation. Many companies were forced to open offices in the EU to employ evacuated employees. This means that taxes are starting to be paid in other jurisdictions, and competencies are gradually migrating abroad. If the state does not create conditions for the return of these specialists after the end of the war, it risks irreversibly losing an entire industry.

What to do: seven steps.

Firstly, the gaming industry needs to be recognized as a critical sector of the economy with an appropriate booking regime. Secondly, introduce tax incentives like the Polish GameINN or the French tax credit for video games. Thirdly, create a state fund for co-financing game projects with Ukrainian themes. Fourth, integrate gamedev into Diya programs. City with full access to benefits. Fifthly, develop educational programs in game design and game programming at universities - today there are critically few such programs. Sixth, launch a state program for localizing games in Ukrainian. And finally, seventhly, create an interdepartmental working group “Gamedev + Defense”, which will systematize the experience of using gaming technologies for the needs of the Armed Forces of Ukraine and will coordinate the state order for simulators.

Poland, the closest geographical neighbor and competitor in game development, has long understood that the gaming industry is a strategic sector. The GameINN program, launched back in 2016, has allocated tens of millions of zlotys to innovative gaming projects. As a result, CD Projekt RED, 11 bit studios, Techland have become global brands, and the Warsaw Stock Exchange has become the European leader in the number of listed game development companies.

France introduced credit d'impot jeu video - a tax credit of up to 30% of video game development costs. This helped turn Ubisoft, Quantic Dream and Arkane into global players. Canada offers similar tax incentives at the provincial level, making Montreal one of the world's game development capitals. Even Serbia has launched a program to support creative industries, which includes game development.

Ukraine remains one of the few countries with a powerful game development industry, where the industry does not have any special government program. Diya.

City, which theoretically should have become the basis for tax incentives, in practice covers only a small part of companies, and its benefits do not compensate for the risks associated with the mobilization of key specialists and the lack of direct funding for developments.

Ukrainian game dev demonstrates paradoxical resilience. The question is not whether Ukraine can compete in the global video game market - it is already doing it, and doing it brilliantly. The question is whether its own state will understand this - and whether it will be too late.

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