Still trying to pep talk myself into grinding the bismark and I even have a talisman on an aced sharnhorst.
Ships are really cool, but the gameplay is boring, and for a realistic game its the same handful of ships in multiple every match, no place for cruisers or destroyers, just fast coastal boats as a means to cap on 3cp maps.
If someone is interested in seeing how effective the new Rank VII battleships were in June 2025, I have made Excel tables based on StatShark data.
Naval Arcade:
Naval Realistic:
Roma 8.3 btw.
It’s fixed now. Thanks for pointing it out.
Full June statistic released. I wonder now Bruce will compare February to June as always? Or will it find some excuse? Cmon Bruce we counting on ya.
Graphs updated with June 2025 data:
Arcade and Realistic stats combined:
Even the major update couldn’t stop Ground and Air modes from losing players in June compared to May.
Naval gained a lot of players in June - clearly a result of the latest major update, which added iconic battleships.
Yes however Air and Ground lost way more than Navy’s gains… Navy’s gains however , might not really be …gains.
There are people that play everything (like me) and that we will play Navy doesn’t mean we won’t play Air or Ground.
The game lost people if anything… But it’s logical , it’s summer .
This graph shows the number of players in battles. StatShark calls this data “Games Played”, but that name isn’t entirely accurate. If there is a battle with let’s say 12 playes and 20 AI bots, the “Games Played” stat will increase by 12. If one player plays 100 battles in a month, this stat will increase by 100 from this player alone. In short, it’s the total number of battles played by all human players (AI bots are not counted).
This is the best stat to show how popular the game mode is at a given time.
Yes, it’s visible in the stats. But if the latest major update didn’t matter, you would expect all 3 game modes to drop in the number of players in battles. But you see a big increase in Naval, so players clearly play Naval more than before.
It’s also reasonable to assume that if someone plays more Naval than usual, they can’t be playing Air or Ground at the same time, so those stats will drop. For example, if you normally play an average of 100 Air battles, 100 Ground battles, and 10 Naval battles each month, but in June you decide to play 100 Naval battles, it’s very unlikely you’ll still manage to play 100 Air and 100 Ground battles as well.
That’s likely part of the reason for the drop in Air and Ground stats. But there are clearly other factors as well. The latest major update also may have felt disappointing from the perspective of Air and Ground players. We also can’t forget about many bugs that were introduced, which had a major impact, especially on Air battles (e.g. malfunctioning missiles and guns).
Considering naval growth I think June is still not fully representative cause update landed on 25th. July will be way more interesting, given Naval event coming soon
I’m more excited to look into combat stats of certain ships (hello Belfast) and overall, after recent BR changes
Considering coming naval event yep it is.
The game will decline if they won’t fix the crap they do.
Adding crap doesn’t work anymore. It works for a month (maybe) and then everything goes down again…
Now you see people playing naval. They will play for a month, they will get bored because it added nothing in gameplay. They won’t stay. Meanwhile without events (practically ^paying^ people) Air/Ground decline…
That’s why pervious event system with all types of vehicles was better it disperse players more equally.
Going from May to June there’s like 2m more sessions in Naval, meanwhile Ground and Air combined lost like 22m sessions. With this in mind, it’s safe to assume latter two modes lost most of that to other games or real life, and not Naval.
Since this update dropped late last month, seeing stats for July will be really interesting, as this is basically the best case scenario for Naval’s growth.
That mode received a massive update with decompression alongside it, while most Ground additions were lackluster to say the least and it was focused around the least played vehicle type.
Air didn’t have much more luck either.
So, at least in my opinion, if Naval’s sessions in July don’t spike like 2-3-4x in comparison to June it might mean that mode will never have a healthy playerbase.
Gaijin dealt perfect cards to Naval, we’ll see will it fold or not.
The correct month to compare with is March, the last one with a major update (and also a naval event).
It should probably be bad news in Gaijin HQ that after ALL that effort, they didn’t manage to get even 10% above the number of sessions they got in March for naval arcade. Statistically the only real growth they got above baseline for their naval efforts has all been in NRB, their most irrelevant non-sim mode (but still gaining now on a faltering AB).
Naval as a whole is still just a rounding error though.It’ll be interesting to see if it finally pulls itself above 2% of game sessions (AB/RB) in July.
The Naval story is a blip in the much more significant WT statistical trend we’re seeing, the growing dominance of ground RB as the “core mode” in the game’s later life now comfortably above 50% of all user sessions, and still growing, even against the seasonal summer drop-off trend. Maybe they should have tried to knock out WoT instead of WoWS.
You see it (and how consistent the player modes actually are relative to each other, single-vehicle events have only a minor effect here) when you look at Ground RB relative to the other modes over the last five months:
You can factor in how much of this is seasonal by looking at Steam users per day for the same period vs player sessions per day. While not a perfect comparison (Steam users could be falling for other reasons besides seasonal, and players and sessions are obviously different) it still somewhat shows that while the rest of the game is following the standard summer decline pretty closely, Ground RB is growing AGAINST the seasonal trend, 30% net growth June over Feb.
Just to manage expectations down a little… there were 6 days of new update in June out of 30. Even if ALL the growth shown in Poul’s graph happened in those 5 days, and that continues for the full July period, so people kept playing at the same intensity as they did in the first week of launch basically, that would still only be a 3x multiplier July over June at most. For 4x there would have to be massive positive word of mouth as well, a “rolling snowball” effect. I think if they get up to a 3x, equating to 5% of all random-match non-sim user sessions, or 13 million user sessions in absolute numbers, in July Gaijin should be absolutely ecstatic at that result, as statistically that would seem absolutely the most they should hope for.
The other interesting question with naval for me is whether AB and RB are inverting in popularity. AB fans should be a little concerned, because, while the data was partial, RB, despite still being the less popular mode (still at 40% of matches, although it’s been climbing lately), had significantly more (52%) of the new top tier BR (8.0-8.7) game sessions in those first six days, 75,512 vs 69,304. So the players that are trying the new top tier ships were tending to use more RB to do it. Given that for the last few months the only place where AB was gaining players WAS top tier, that could indicate any inversion is now getting accelerated by the update and the new ships, but it’s too early to be very confident in that… we’ll see in a month.
For sure (4899788/4138281-1)*100= 18.4% is bad.
So you run with your numbers all around the forums, when they were bad, stating that naval is domed, and now you want to wait when they are way better, you are inconsistent don’t you think?
It seems so:
This trend is surprising, given that the aiming change in Naval Arcade (introduced in March) was meant to attract more players to this mode. But it looks like Naval Realistic, without aiming changes, now feels more appealing to new Naval players.
If this trend continues in the coming months, Naval Realistic could become more popular than Naval Arcade even later this year. The July stats should make the situation much clearer (first full month after the update, and a Naval event is expected to start this month).
This will definitely be an interesting trend to watch.
For sure, you just need to convince 859584 - 616706 = 242878 more players.
I suspect the changes to AA, which have a greater effect in making planes viable again in NRB (which saw no planes at all at any BR six months ago), are also having an effect. More data will tell.
Gaijin has definitely turned things around for NRB for now with the March and June updates, I agree that apparent trend is continuing in the June data. It and GRB are the only modes that are really showing a consistent growth trend (just with NRB on a much smaller base). The question that we could still use more data on, whether NAB can get off life support as well or continue to fade, will have better answers with a full month of data in July. It’s not just the “first week of update” effect but also the BR decompression here was so radical it’s impossible to really conclude anything from summations of individual ship data other than for the really new stuff (which you already did above) and the all-games total can only tell you so much. Need a full month’s data on all ships with the new BR meta locked in first.
