The privileged Russians, you mean. I know a few people in Russia, good people, that have no prospects of ever getting out.
Being able to pick a country to reside in is a privilege most people can't afford, and that's before you factor in only 5% of Russians can speak English and that's makes up 80% of the foreign language speakers in Russia and you've got yourself a very immobile population.
Shovel Knight was kickstarted and they have a total flat hierarchy, fair payment system, and evenly distributed wages and bonuses.
I work for a major games studio and if I started my own studio, I would 100% use crowdfunding. Financing in games is broken.
You tend to need someone with deep pockets willing to eat costs for 2-5 years for 10-100 people (depending on project size) in the gamble it'll pay off. Because it's a gamble, the financer (in most cases China's tencent) are constantly breathing over your shoulder and demanding the impossible (oh all the devs say this'll take three years? You have six months) and the motive changes from "make enough money for the studio to survive" to "make enough money so your financial backers can get a new boat".
Then with F2P and live service (where I work) you get the constant demand for growth and perpetual play. Forget that churn is inevitable as people's moods and desires change. Forget that there's a maximum number of people in the world that are interested in your game. You have to grow at all costs all the time. That's what leads to the predatory F2P system.
We also have to remember F2P was born out of Shareware, perhaps my favourite distribution model. In non-corporate hands, it can be a fantastic thing.
OH god, in Coventry it's all they talk about. But a tentative yes. It was flattened in WW2, but didn't have the clout of London so it was rebuilt as the utter hell hole it is now. However, there was still a lot of industry there (mostly cars) until the Thatcher era. And then that went away as well. Now there's two unis and that's about it
The fact we have an idiom "sent to Coventry" meaning to deliberately ostracise someone should tell you all you need to know.
I went to uni in that city; there isn't enough money in all the world to make me go back there. City of 300k people with over 3k homeless. Utter monstrosity of brutalist architecture (the university library is based on a panopticon prison, I kid you not). And the ring road! Taking your life in your hand just merging into it!
Absolutely insane amount of crime, with one of the highest rates of child sexual abuse in the country (for context, it's crime index is about 20% higher than London's). And I've never seen so many street walkers in my life! Plus they charge, I am not joking, £20 a go.
Ohh that sounds exactly like what I'm looking for!