That's exactly for the purpose of making a profit, and that's all. At the same time, article 244 does not apply to games at all, because its name is "Desecration of the bodies of the dead and their burial places."
And again, it's really about pornography and profit-taking, especially if it involves underage harassment and other indecency.
Of course, I meant Article 242 and simply made a typo. I corrected it in my initial post so as not to mislead others. Now: no, you're wrong.
The law makes no concessions for the production of porn without human participation.
Let’s look at the first part of Article 242:
“Illegal production and/or movement across the State Border of the Russian Federation for the purposes of distribution, public demonstration or advertising, or the
distribution, public demonstration or advertising of pornographic materials or items shall be punishable by imprisonment for a term of two to eight years, with or without deprivation of the right to hold certain positions or engage in certain activities for a term of up to fifteen years.”
There it is—already a violation.
Now the third part of Article 242, under the section on acts covered by the first part but committed “with the extraction of income on a large scale (For the purposes of this Article, as well as Article 242.1 of this Code, large-scale income shall be recognized as income in an amount exceeding fifty thousand rubles.)”: punishable by imprisonment for three to ten years, with or without deprivation of the right to hold certain positions or engage in certain activities for up to fifteen years, and with or without restriction of freedom for up to two years.
Income involved? That’s already the aggravated part.
You’ll say it only applies to porn with real people? Fine, let’s check the official commentary to the article, point 5: “Production means creating pornographic materials by any method (drawing, photographing, video recording, etc.).”
As you can see, there’s no exemption for rendering or 3D modeling—it’s still considered production.
Still not convinced? Okay, just search for “Art college student convicted for pornographic drawings after classmate’s report”:
“According to the verdict of the Leninsky District Court, published on its website, Elena (name changed) is a professional artist who mainly draws based on anime works and studies animation and animated film at a college in Tomsk. The girl had a public VKontakte group with 135 subscribers where she posted her own drawings and reposted works by other authors.
Among the images in the group were ones of an erotic nature. They outraged one of Elena’s classmates, according to the court verdict.
‘In this group she discovered drawings of a pornographic nature depicting animated characters, including in the anime genre, but with signs of pornography. <...> The page also contained drawings of a pornographic nature promoting non-traditional sexual relations. <...> Among the drawings were works depicting a naked girl with male genitalia. There were also drawings of a man in women’s clothing. In some drawings, anime characters were engaged in sexual intercourse,’ the court verdict states.”
Now listen, I’m not denying that the chances of actually getting hit with this article are astronomically low. You’d really have to try to draw attention, and most convictions under it involve LGBT-related content, minors, or something else extra. But technically the risk exists—if some hater bothers to file a report, the police are obliged to investigate, and things could end very badly.
So we have to keep this in mind: yes, prosecutions are rare, convictions are few, and almost always there’s some additional factor, like with Yulia Tsvetkova who was formally charged under this article too. But the article is there. Technically, developing a hentai game falls under it. So we need to be honest here and not bury our heads in the sand.