The internal cold war at Motorsport Games
With the outbreak of the war in Ukraine, the US software house known for the official Nascar video games has kicked out the Moscow developers who are now threatening Motorsport Games to make the source code of their racing games public
Fibrillation within one of the best-known American software houses among racing-loving gamers, Motorsport Games. Perhaps the name of the studio based in Florida, in Miami, will not say anything to European gamers, given that over the years it has concentrated above all on Nascar competitions (American car races that do not have great success here), but in the States the acquisition of the license by the National Association for Stock Car Auto Racing, LLC, which took place in 2018, brought him luck and success, so much so that now Motorsport Games has various locations all over the world: Orlando, Silverstone (Great Britain) and Moscow, where the developers who put their hands on the graphics engine code of their products work. And the Moscow office is giving the American software house quite a few headaches.
WHAT HAPPENS IN MOTORSPORT GAMES
With the outbreak of war in Ukraine, in order not to be overwhelmed by sanctions, Motorsport Games found itself making a difficult choice: to close the Moscow studio, transferring it to Georgia.
If such an operation would in itself be sufficient to undermine the relationship between the parent company and the Russian employees, who were asked to suddenly change their lives by moving to another country, the casus belli would concern the fact that the developer of racing video games would not have foreseen an expense fund from which the transferred developers could draw.
THE COMPANY PUTS EMPLOYEES OUT THE DOOR…
In short, the change of country, the burden of finding a new home, etc… has ended up with the developers. As if all this were not enough, those who packed their bags and moved then received a paycheck reduced by 20%, given that life is cheaper in Georgia than in Russia, while according to employees complaining on the Internet who wanted to stay in Moscow, proposing smart working as a solution, a document would arrive in their letterbox to sign with their voluntary resignation.
…AND EMPLOYEES BLACKMAIL THE COMPANY
A bad business that some Russian developers have decided to make even worse. Because in fact it is in Moscow that the heart of every game of the US label is born and so some of the expelled employees decided to blackmail the Florida software house: either retrace your steps or the source code of NASCAR: Ignition 21, NASCAR: HEAT 5, Indycar and KartKraft will be released online. Which in simple terms would mean killing the titles in question, given that their technical scaffolding would become public domain and, therefore, more or less replicable by anyone who dabbles in this kind of thing.
Press sources report that an employee would have directly threatened the CEO of Motorsport Games, Dmitry Kozko , and the new top management of the company , who took over after the departure of the entire Board of Directors in November.
The ultimatum will expire on January 25 and it is not clear how the software house wants to behave, which of course should have enough material in hand to make the police intervene, but is well aware that, at present, it would be impossible to prosecute Russian citizens living in Fly.
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/economia-on-demand/la-guerra-fredda-interna-a-motorsport-games/ on Wed, 18 Jan 2023 12:05:45 +0000.