With Warthunder, we do not have tangible proof of such but nonetheless, the way pricing, battlepass, crew skills, bushes all work out? It’s one of the most insidious companies in the western MMO market (of course, korean MMOs will tend to be worse but … yeah)
Compare with SWTOR, LOL, Dota 2, AOE2:DE, Guild Wars 2 or FF14 - none of them have anywhere near the practices Gaijin employs.
All other MMOs have far more nefarious monetization.
War Thunder is $40 a year for premium.
Entirely optional vehicles are free or get constant sales while being the cheapest in the genre.
DCS and Train Sim say hi.
Crew skills are earned through in-game.
Bushes are a non-issue.
BP is optional.
Pricing as proven earlier is the cheapest.
FF14 costs 3x as much for membership, and has actual locked content.
Totally different games, not even comparable. Paying $90 for a top tier plane in WT, vs $90 for a highly detailed aircraft, in a good simulator.
They are earned to slowly, and they are the only thing in WT that is pay to win. You can directly buy an advantage over others.
Being able to obscure weakspots entirely, or hide your whole tank is an advantage, and you can pay for it. They are too slow to be earned through BP tasks, and they aren’t always available.
WT has terrible monetization. The grind takes forever. Modifications take too long to get, and the game tries to force you into buying them for GE. There is no justifiable reason to have high tier premiums cost so much.
Most expensive two planes are $75, and with those you can grind out entire tech trees which is worth hundreds of hours of playtime.
As you said, different games. If you preferred the gameplay of DCS, you’d play it instead of War Thunder.
I agree to an extent, and that buying crew skill should be removed and the rate at which it is earned increased. However, it should be noted that buying crew skill is also the only way for newer players to a tech tree to stay competitive at top tier when they buy a top tier premium. Even if you are relatively experienced, you might not have very high level crews in the country you are trying to grind.
If crew skills are the worst thing about war thunders monetization, then war thunders monitization isn’t bad.
Bushes should just be removed to be honest. They don’t add anything interesting or unique to gameplay. Obviously, Gaijin won’t do that, so I hope they make them available in more battle passes. They aren’t slow to earn because it is especially hard to earn the war bonds, they’re slow to earn because they’re not in every battlepass.
Ignoring the plethora of other monetization features.
Crew skills are earned through in-game.
After 10 years of playing I have zero crews at level 150, ace crews are also extremely demanding to get ‘for free’ and impossible to match someone who pays for them.
Bushes are a non-issue.
Objective advantage
BP is optional.
BP is optional, events are optional, a lot of things are optional but every time you opt out of something you lose out on vehicles, which isn’t always a big deal with things like a Petard but that definitely isn’t always the case.
Plus event vehicles can be used for future events as well.
Pricing as proven earlier is the cheapest.
Just the other day there was a guy who spends $2-3 a day on changing daily tasks, that’s adds up real quick…
You can easily spend stupid amounts of money on this game.
Your friend either needs to get help, plays in an unusual and abnormal way or he’s spending money.
I don’t cause I play all ten tech trees and use more crews than them.
As most people would, and thus 150 crews become out of reach.
Bushes stop being useful when you face people that visualize the tanks they’re facing.
Okay, so they are useful when you are facing people who do not visualize the tanks they’re facing.
There are also plenty of scenarios where the bushes completely obscure identifying features of a vehicle so you can visualize a trip back to the hangar instead.
I’ve hit over 20 bushed driver’s ports of KV-1s fragging them… cause I visualize the tank in my head.
Please read the following article on Dota 2 on glance value, silhoutte and rules on cosmetics implementation in another peer F2P game:
A hero’s silhouette must be clearly identifiable at first glance.
The silhouette should show a character’s orientation.
Bushes would be fine as tech tree/modification items you can fast-track with GE/premium, them being a BP/purchase object makes them predatory by virtue of FOMO/limited availability.
I have 17 bushes I have gotten out of the Warbond Shop for FREE, 11 of which I got before the BP even came into the game. I have never paid for a bush yet and have plenty. You can actually get the bushes from the Warbond Shop without paying for the BP if you so desire. There’s really nothing “predatory” about them, getting or using them. I play AB tanks mostly and the bushes don’t really help much there at all anyway. But I have them if I want them and whenever I get a new tank, I put some decals and bushes on them so they are ready to go if/when I choose to use them. Learning to work the game instead of letting it work you is a good virtue to develop. Being addled by anger & emotion, playing the “victim” and being easily offended will not lead anyone down a path in life that has a happy ending I don’t think . . . Being pragmatic and looking at things from more than one point of view, being open to accepting new information & looking for solutions to problems, rather than just finding the problems can make the your world a better place. I say all this even though I do realize . . some folks just like to argue . . . ☻
Update: have now unlocked both the banana, and bunch of bananas decorators. They seem to drop randomly after a game, out of a chest that has a random chance of including the decorators, or the victory marks decal
