2025 had many positive moments for Ukrainian gamers: new projects from domestic developers, a number of international recognitions, and more localizations in Ukrainian. dev.ua has collected key achievements that defined this year for the Ukrainian gaming community.
2025 had many positive moments for Ukrainian gamers: new projects from domestic developers, a number of international recognitions, and more localizations in Ukrainian. dev.ua has collected key achievements that defined this year for the Ukrainian gaming community.
In 2023, we wrote that Ukrainian localization in games was going through its best days — due to the full-scale invasion in Ukraine, the perception of the Russian language had sharply deteriorated, and players were actively reporting to developers that Russian localization was no longer enough for our market. In 2025, we can say that the trend has continued and more and more developers are adding Ukrainian to the list of localizations.
Two years ago, the Catalog of Ukrainian Game Localization included 1,477 projects with official translations, and now this figure has grown to over 3,000. The Ukrainian language is already present in the game of the year — Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, and its main competitor for this title — Kingdom Come: Deliverance II. Domestic localization appears not only in large projects, but is also becoming common in indie games of various scales — it is present in the picturesque Constance and Absolum or cooperative PEAK and Jump Space .
Large services are also joining the Ukrainianization process — this year, Ukrainian came to the digital game store Epic Games Store and the streaming platform Twitch .
The Palaye communications agency held the Ukrainian Games Festival 2025 on Steam for the fourth time. The event featured over 480 games created in Ukraine and many new ones were announced.
Among them was DDoD, a tactical roguelite shooter with four-player co-op and a «stalker vibe,» which has already crossed the 50,000 like mark, as well as The Road of Dust and Sorrow, a post-apocalyptic survival horror adventure inspired by classics like Resident Evil and Silent Hill.
A cozy game about travel, trade, farming, and building your own farm — and Chumaky — has attracted a lot of attention. In it, players will become Chumaks who travel through authentic villages, trade with locals, complete quests, and explore mysterious locations. According to the developer, the project is also collecting a lot of wishlists .
According to the organizers, Ukrainian Games Festival 2025 was visited by 2.4 million Steam users, which is one and a half times more than last year. In total, 23 new projects were announced during the festival and six releases took place, among which were «Ukrainian dancers in embroidered shirts.»
2025 was the year of releases for a number of services from Ukrainian developers that help players track statistics, search for localizations in their native language, or adequate teammates.
WhatTheGame, a video game tracking service, didn’t launch this year, but it received several important updates in 2025. First, the developers released an Android app for their service, and later announced an AI assistant that helps gamers choose their next game. In the fall, WTG users also got the opportunity to set their own statuses and create lists with their own games of the year.
A Ukrainian gamer with the nickname N1kk0 released the GRAVK service in 2025. It allows players to form their collection, lists of completed and desired games, track progress, share achievements, and find new games. GRAVK allows you to mark whether all achievements have been obtained and whether the user has played the project on Steam Deck. There is also the ability to rate games and leave reviews. Over the year, the project has been constantly updated and has now reached version 1.21.0, which has the «What to play» function.
In the summer, Ukrainian IT professional Andriy Mahas created the Telegram bot IndieSafe, which helps IT professionals looking for a job in game development. He has a blacklist of studios and recruiters that developers have complained about. «I look for data in open sources — Telegram, LinkedIn, forums. People also write to me directly, send evidence. If the information is confirmed, the company gets on the list. If not, I leave it for the future, but I don’t publish it,» Mahas said about his project.
Another project is Karmageddon, a browser extension that runs on the web version of the esports platform FACEIT and allows you to rate your teammates’ behavior in Counter-Strike 2 after each match. Karmageddon allows you to choose an emoji that matches the player’s vibe: Toxic, Negative, Meh, Chill, Awesome (in English for now). The rating will always be displayed next to the player on FACEIT and will help you decide who else to play with and who to avoid.
Another service, “ Game Haven,» was created by a Ukrainian IT guy named Vitaliy, who joined the Defense Forces and is currently serving in the Marine Corps in the Unmanned Systems Battalion. The site allows players to see which games from their Steam library have Ukrainian localization, which games are Ukrainian, and which are Russian. Information about the availability of Ukrainian localization is collected from two sources: the Steam store (search by the «Ukrainian language» criterion) and the KULI catalog, which also provides information about the type of localization (text, voiceover, official, unofficial, semi-official) and the origin of the game (Ukrainian, Russian).
The kurin ' project also works on the basis of the KULI website. It works similarly to the Steam or Vortex launchers, but is designed for games with Ukrainian localization. kurin' offers «one-click» localization download, automatic installation and removal of Ukrainianizers. The service was created in the GameGlobe Localization community, which creates fan localizations of video games.
Canadian studio Offworld Industries has released one of the biggest updates of the year , Trident Strike, for its tactical shooter Squad, introducing the Ukrainian Armed Forces faction with authentic weapons and equipment for the first time. The developers noted that they decided to add the Ukrainian army because their active player base from Ukraine ranks 3rd–4th in size.
The Armed Forces of Ukraine are part of the BLUEFOR alliance, along with the armies of the United States, Canada, Australia, and the United Kingdom. They are opposed by REDFOR, which consists of the Russian army, which uses Soviet and Russian weapons and equipment.
The Armed Forces of Ukraine in the game Squad are represented by the following units:
The vehicles and weapons of the Armed Forces of Ukraine are focused on Soviet and Ukrainian equipment produced in 2021–2022. In particular, players can use the KrAZ-6322 truck, the Kozak-2M1 armored vehicle, the BTR-4 combat vehicle, the T-64BM2 Bulat tank, and the Mi-8MTV-5 helicopter. The Ukrainian infantry is armed with Stugna-P anti-tank systems, with the ability to be remotely controlled via a separate remote control, as well as the AK-74, Malyuk, UAR-10, RPK-74, SVD, and RPG-7. Commanders can call on the Su-25, which drops FAB-250 aerial bombs, the Bayraktar TB2 UAV for reconnaissance, and artillery fire for destruction.
«We can’t confirm this yet, but future updates may add more specific battle groups focused on operations after 2022 that will use Western-made equipment, as well as a potential small faction focused on less traditional aspects of the Ukrainian Armed Forces,» said lead game designer Baron von Beuys.
Paradox Interactive has released another part of the historical strategy, Europa Universalis V, which pleasantly pleased Ukrainian players with the correct toponyms on the territory of Ukraine. The developers were helped by Ukrainian enthusiasts, among whom was Dmytro Mulin, a physicist from Sumy who has lived in the Czech Republic for 15 years.
According to him, approximately 80% of the toponyms in Europa Universalis V were completely correct from the very beginning. There were about 200–300 Ukrainian locations in the game, most of which had correct names.
«There were also completely Soviet or late names, such as Kominternivske in the Odessa region or Krasnograd. And there could be old toponyms nearby, for example Zdvyzhen — also from the pre-Mongol period. That is, everything was a bit mixed up: Polish, Russian, German transliterations, communist names — literally a few of each type,» said Dmytro.
Thanks to the developers' attention and suggestions from enthusiasts, Europa Universalis V now allows for Ukrainian, rather than Russified, toponyms, such as Kyiv, Chernigiv, or Zaporizhzhia. This also applies to the names of local rulers.
Interestingly, Russian players disliked this approach so much that they created a modification that changes the toponyms in the territories of Ukraine to Russian ones.
The long-awaited «STALKER 2: Heart of Chernobyl» received many positive reviews upon release, especially from Ukrainian players, but also received a lot of criticism, including from the gaming press. The reason was mostly the technical condition of the project — poor optimization and numerous bugs that sometimes prevented quests from being completed.
There were also questions about the game’s balance and economy, which ultimately resulted in a mediocre 73 score on Metacritic, and some game reviewers dubbed STALKER 2 a «eurojank.» This unofficial genre refers to games made in Europe that boast interesting ideas and systems but lack budget and technical sophistication.
However, the GSC Game World studio did not abandon the project after the release and began to diligently fix the shortcomings. The first months after the release of STALKER 2 were remembered for huge patches of hundreds of GB and thousands of fixes. Early updates were aimed at fixing the most glaring bugs and improving optimization, but later the developers began to adjust finer systems, such as character behavior and the implementation of the promised A-Life system, which simulates «life in the Zone.»
At release, STALKER 2 was available on PC and Xbox, but a year later it also appeared on PS5 consoles. PlayStation players initially received the game updated to version 1.7, which became much more stable, but on other platforms, the developers' significant work on bugs in STALKER 2 was also evident. This was noted by experts from the Digital Foundry project, which analyzes the technical aspect of video games.
In 2024, DF reported that STALKER 2 had major performance issues, especially on computers with weak processors. On Xbox Series consoles, the game also failed to maintain a stable 60 frames per second (and occasionally dropped to 40 FPS) and suffered from stuttering and freezes.
«The game’s anniversary on other platforms also gives us at DF a good opportunity to review its progress, after which we discovered something surprising: now, a year later, we can finally recommend the game on its original launch platforms — PC and Xbox,» Digital Foundry specialists noted .
According to them, STALKER 2 now shows an average performance increase of 26% on weak CPUs, and this increase is accompanied by a much more stable frame rate.
Perhaps the redemption of GSC Game World does not yet look as amazing as the famous returns of players' love, demonstrated by the developers of No Man’s Sky or Cyberpunk 2077, but the state of STALKER 2 at the release was not so catastrophic. In a year, the legendary Ukrainian game has become much better and deserves a second chance from the players it may have scared off at first acquaintance.
