(Image credit: Alexey Nikolsky via Getty / EA)

Cast your mind back to October 2024 and you may remember the time when Russia fined Google a website-breaking amount of money . Like grains of rice on a chessboard, a fine Russia levied against Google for blocking some pro-Kremlin channels had compounded to the point that Google 'owed' the country ₽2 undecillion . That's a two followed by 36 zeroes. That amount was later capped at a more generous ₽91.5 quintillion but, either way, it's more money than there is on Earth.

Which I suspect, as a tactic, was not much of a winner, as Russian courts have turned around and asked for a much more payable fine from EA, Take-Two, Battlestate, and NetEase (via Kommersant ) for failing to localise the data of Russian gamers on domestic servers.

Law firm Semenov and Pevzner told Kommersant that Russia's media regulator, Roskomnadzor, had filed lawsuits resulting in ₽2 million fines against the four companies, while three remaining lawsuits against Embracer Group, Digital…