- Статьи
- Internet and technology
- Entertainment of attention: Russian games will be shown at the largest festival in South Korea
Entertainment of attention: Russian games will be shown at the largest festival in South Korea
Games from domestic authors will take part in South Korea's largest themed festival, G-Star, which will be held in Busan from November 13 to 15. The Russians are sending a large delegation for the first time: the Antelus Games studio is bringing nine of its projects with national ideas, for example, "The Heart of Altai", and the Watt studio will show the Koreans "Tsarevna". The largest Russian game Distortion from Game Art Pioneers studio will also be presented in Busan. What other domestic projects will be presented at the exhibition can be found in the Izvestia article.
The cultural code of Russians in South Korea
G-Star, South Korea's largest thematic festival, which will be held in Busan on November 13-15, will feature 15 domestic projects from different studios, Izvestia found out. A year earlier, the exhibition was visited only by the official Russian RuStore app store and Geeky House, a mobile game developer, but now the number of participants has grown significantly.
RuStore is also participating in the exhibition this year as part of a joint delegation with the Moscow Creative Industries Agency (AKI). According to representatives of the store, cooperation between the two countries in the field of entertainment content is becoming stronger: according to the results of a VTsIOM survey, 33% of Russians are familiar with South Korean games.
"We also see interest in Asian content from our audience — since the beginning of 2025, the demand for such games in RuStore has grown by 15%, and they account for more than 50% of all payments among foreign services," explained Svyatoslav Zinovsky, head of business development at RuStore.
Earlier, the company entered the Korean market, so now local publishers can publish their applications and games on the domestic platform, the press service said.
Representatives of the publishing house Antelus Games will show the psychological horror The Black Ice in Busan, which will send players to a scientific complex in Antarctica to explore a dangerous place. Another studio project, "The Heart of Altai," will show the beauty of the region and allow for a better understanding of ancestral culture. An expedition to find the lost city will lead blogger Arina Demidova to unexpected corners of the republic.
The studio reported that the experience gained in Japan at the Tokyo Game Show allowed them to receive invitations to other world exhibitions and a trip to Korea would be a new step in strengthening ties with global representatives of the gaming industry. In total, the publisher will bring nine projects to Busan: in addition to those listed, these are The Soul, Sea Walker Saga, True Thief, Clinch Legends, Nightmares Awake, Cat's Wars and Lethal Grace.
Screenshot of the game "Heart of Altai"
According to Elena Degtyareva, general producer of Watt, the studio will show the game "Tsarevna" to Koreans for the first time, this is the world's first ballet slasher where the player assumes the role of the mysterious warrior Princess Swan. The plot is inspired by Slavic folklore and Alexander Pushkin's fairy tales. The fighting style was created on the basis of choreography using motion capture technology with the participation of the prima ballerina of the Bolshoi Theater Alyona Kovaleva.
— Our second project will be Grimps, in which players will have to fight with plush invaders. We are confident that the gameplay features and visual style of both projects will resonate with a demanding Korean audience," she added.
Screenshot of the Tiny Bunny game
Game Art Pioneers, one of Russia's largest game studios, will show Tiny Bunny, a Russian visual novel in the horror genre that is especially beloved by the domestic audience and has every chance of conquering the Asian market. Especially for G-Star, the game will receive a Korean localization, which will be available in the fifth and final chapter of the game after its release on December 5.
— As part of private business meetings, we are showing our flagship project Distortion, a large-scale action adventure, systematically building up partnerships for the future release of the game. In 2024, we already traveled to Korea together with the Russian Export Center at the Korea x Russia Content Summit in Seoul. But this is the first time we will be in Busan," said Gleb Kadomtsev, Director of Business Development at Game Art Pioneers.
Screenshot of the game "Midnight Souls"
The press service of the IndieGo publishing house announced that two projects will be shown at once. The first will be the adventure game Midnight Souls by Sergey Bolshakov. This is an immersion into the nostalgic atmosphere of Russia in the 1990s: prefabricated houses, garages, carpets on the walls and many recognizable memes. The second is the dark adventure puzzle game Lost in the Roots from Trioskaz studio, which created the super hit I'm Not a Human (sales exceeded 500 thousand copies in less than a month).
— In 2023, our team already visited the exhibition to assess its scale and potential. We were impressed by the level of the event and that's why we decided to participate this year as an Indie Go publishing house," they added.
Development of the video game development segment
The participation of the Russian delegation in G-Star 2025 was the result of three years of systematic work by the Organization for the Development of the Video Game Industry (RVRI) and the Agency for Creative Industries with colleagues from South Korea. They are already signing their first contracts and expanding their foreign audience.
— In 2025, record support for the export of Russian game projects has been allocated, from the Tokyo Game Show to IGDC in India. Thanks to this, not only major publishers, but also indie studios are entering international circulation," said Vasily Ovchinnikov, CEO of RVRI.
As the press service of the Ministry of Finance of the Russian Federation informed Izvestia, the segment of the video game industry in Russia is a full-fledged element of the IT industry, and the current benefits and preferences for the industry apply to game studios. At the same time, representatives of the RVR actively participate in meetings of the public council under the Ministry, where, among other things, their proposals for the development of the video game development segment in the country are being considered, the ministry added.
Major gaming exhibitions are becoming more like business venues where it is important to understand the specifics of the market, says Svyatoslav Pegov, director of the Center for Sports Programming, Algorithmic Robotics, Cybersecurity and Esports at Ufa University of Science and Technology. Koreans love online and competitive games, which is why these genres should be promoted in the region.
According to IT expert Ivan Kalmykov, cooperation is developing in both directions. Thus, South Korean studios are already beginning to enter the Russian market, and participation in exhibitions is an investment in the image of the Russian Federation as a center of creative industries and the formation of a sustainable partnership channel where economics is more important than politics, he added.
G-Star has been held since 2005, initially the exhibition was held in Seoul, but since 2009 it has always been held in Busan. G-Star is considered the largest video game conference, in 2024 it was attended by more than 215 thousand people from 2211 companies from different countries.
Переведено сервисом «Яндекс Переводчик»
