Ukraine game studio becomes a home for the stranded

Daniel Poludyonny never thought his Ukrainian game development company would become a place where his developers would actually live. But that is what happened with the company’s offices in Kyiv and Lviv during the Russian invasion of the country.

Poludyonny is head of N-iX Game & VR Studio, a 10-year-old work-for-hire game studio (and a division of parent firm N-iX) that is representative of many game studios that employed tens of thousands of game developers in Ukraine before the war. The studio is based in Lviv, in the safer western part of Ukraine, but it has had an office in Kyiv, now the center of much of the fighting, since 2016.

The studio has continued to do work for customers like Seattle-based Irreverent Labs, maker of an upcoming mecha fighting game. Poludyonny wants to tell others that his company continues to operate and it can still get tasks done for its core clients in the U.S. and Europe. But he also wants to convey how difficult life has become during the war.