War thunder technically fits the criteria, but the devs don’t do enough to make the game as good as it could be. I don’t think War Thunder is worth voting for because of that.
I’m mildly biased, but a game like BeamNG or Satisfactory are much more deserving than WT, and there are plenty more games that are.
Let me say it loud and clear for even all the special kids in the back; I’ll vote for a story game with a freaky tomboy over Gaijin’s slop any day of the week, all year round. Gaijin can get bent over, sideways, and under - and so can anyone who likes polishing them with their mouth.
That is by definition “A labor of love”.
Labor of love means putting continuous work into a project, which Gaijin objectively does.
Your post is not the complaint you think it is.
Dude, it’s just NMS’s dev team that puts as much if not more love into their project.
There are no other games being as worked on as NMS and War Thunder.
Also there’s no such thing as a monopoly with War Thunder. War Thunder doesn’t have a monopoly.
Anything released this year doesn’t count because for it to be a labor of love it needs continuous, which means the oldest games are going to be the nominees.
PEAK released this year, TF2 is more of a labor of love than it.
PoE might be old, but it doesn’t get updates.
ATS most certainly gets updates but it’s DCS/Train Simulator levels.
TF2, War Thunder, WoT, NMS, World of Warcraft, etc.
And we know for a fact TF2, WoT, and WoW don’t get as many feature-rich updates as NMS and WT.
Words have meaning.
Aha, but you see - it doesn’t matter how long it has taken to make something. The problem is, after thirteen years, Warthunder is still…
AWFUL.
Do you hear me? AWFUL. A-W-F-U-L. It’s a good concept made by a mediocre dev who lost the plot years ago, dude. It’s the videogame equivalent of McDonalds; great concept, great idea, some good ingredients, but the cooks can’t spell a thing in a real language (english) and are trying to steal your wallet half the time you’re there.
You can spend thirteen years on a game and still suck at making games.
You can spend thirteen years working on a game and make a good game.
Sadly, Gaijin has only been able to the former, not the latter. So no. Gaijin still does NOT deserve a “Labor of Love” award. Not in a million years. Never. Nope. Nada. Нет. Nein. I will vote for a MILLION ancient hentai games over this one, no matter what.
@MZARC
War Thunder’s gameplay is quite literally Battlefield’s game modes but with aircraft, tanks, and ships.
The game idea is massive, and complex.
So I get you hate the shooter and vehicle combat genre of games, but that doesn’t say anything about the games, just your genre preferences.
The game being “good” or “bad” doesn’t matter for the award “labor of love”.
Because as I said, labor of love is about the attention a developer gives a game.
This is why NMS and WT are the 2 options for Steam.
Most gotcha games would be on this list as well, but most aren’t on Steam, let alone many years on Steam.
At this time, TF2 would be more of a labor of love than all gotcha games currently on Steam.
Oh, and War Thunder is $40 a year.
Runescape is $100.
Final Fantasy 14 is $170.
Renting a DCS server is $300.
Being VIP on good DCS servers is $50 a year.
War Thunder remains among the individually cheapest, and largest games ever developed.
We can and do complain about bugs, because they are going to happen with a game this size.
We can and do complain about lack of features, because it takes time for dev teams to create them.
None of that takes away a game’s title for Labor of Love, because Labor of Love is about actions, not inaction.
40 dollars a year
Fuck, I do got a problem.
Regardless, I really don’t care at all how much labor they’ve put into it. I really could care less. I could care infinitely less about how many years they’ve toiled, how many poor, sweaty, awful ages those poor devs have slaved away in their basements in… Cyprus? Cyprus, because the game still doesn’t get any love from me. Or anyone else on steam anyways. Go ahead and count all the comments saying they’ll vote for gaijin for me, I’ll wait. Nominate War Thunder in the “Labor of Love” Category for The Steam Awards 2025! :: War Thunder Events & Announcements
I’m happy to say that this game isn’t looking too good on being nominated for any award anytime soon. I look forward to seeing the devs beg for something later or whatever else they decide to do. Wah, wah. Cry me a river.
I think I’ll post some of my favorite comments here, actually.
‘На дитё инцеста я бы номинировала, я то знаю о чём говорю’ - ‘I would nominate for the child of incest, I know what I’m talking about’
‘Мой голос не зарегает, как и снаряды’ - ‘My voice doesn’t register, just like the shells’
‘What labor and what love?’
‘когда деревья нормально пофиксите?’ - ‘When will you fix the trees properly?’
‘heck no’
‘Gaijin still thinks it’s april 1st🥀’
‘Same thing every year. It isn’t any funnier this time.’
‘amor e o meu ovo - love and my egg’ (I have no idea what he means.)
‘more like slave of labor’
‘傻比bvvd，我操你妈！！！！！！’ - I’m not even gonna say that one, but it’s hilarious.
‘Категории «Любимые ба------д» нет. Так что, улитки, проходите мимо…’ - ‘There’s no “Favorite Ba------d” category. So, snails, move on…’
‘until you region lock the chinese on own THIS GAME WILL BE NOMINATED TO “SUCK MY N–S”.’
‘不是bvvd你配吗，下个版本中系不出相控阵雷达飞机，我直接让你马飞起来’ - ‘If you’re not a BVVD, do you even deserve it? In the next patch, the Chinese faction won’t release phased-array radar aircraft, and I’ll make your horse fly.’ (What’s a BVVD anyways?)
‘Oh nawrr. Must have been the wind.’
And many more now on steam for your viewing pleasure! I think I’ll go review bomb them a little instead of a nice vote. How does that sound?
Hate the developers not the players
But it should be about love and not about making money.
It’s a F2P game. Either they add more stuff or a lot of players would just leave.
If they add things that aren’t about selling premiums, BP and FOMO Events but actually something that makes the players enjoy the game, it would be different.
The developers literally give nothing to the players.
You either pay them or spend time grinding.
„Here, have fun playing your stock tank with stock crew after already playing the game for 1000h.
Oh here’s your daily SL/RP booster, good luck.“
You can’t even get GE anymore, so the only way to even get some premiums is by being forced to grind a store that has its progress reset every couple of weeks.
Sure the developers should get money out of the players too but how do they do that?
Not by making a good game but having a monopoly filled with toxic practices to manipulate players into spending time or money.
Over 90% of content added to War Thunder doesn’t make direct money.
QOL features, of which over 20 were added since the beginning of 2024.
Countless free vehicles that I get for just having fun in my favorite vehicles.
As I said, there are negative aspects to criticize.
However, none of those criticisms impact the fact that BVVD and the rest of the dev team are creating their passion project.
I can get GE on the store right now…
War Thunder has no monopoly and never has, either. I can go to Steam and find thousands of games that indirectly compete for peoples’ attention, and dozens of games in the same genre.
Maybe in your dreams.
Every update is 90% vehicles, maps and map changes
And 10% is bug fixes, with most of them flipping a value on vehicles because they were incorrectly implemented, which takes 1 minute to change.
At this point the developers might as well give players a whole freaking tech tree for free and it wouldn’t change how you would still have to either choose a horrible gameplay experience, of grinding stock vehicles with stock crews, or spending money to play the game with a vehicle’s actual performance.
Not to mention that there are still thousands of vehicles, that would take your entire life to unlock.
Most bug fixes occur in standard updates, of which there are over 100 per year.
DCS in comparison has far less bug fix updates.
Nice to see the mods censoring dissent yet again.
From Alvis:
ATS has many inaccuracies for cities.
Yes, it’s a labor of love, but it’s worked on with the intent of profiting off of each state.
And yet entire states are anywhere from $10-$20 dollars, and a bundle of 28 entire DLCS is $92.25, whereas in WT a single vehicle could go for $70, $80, sometimes up to $200 dollars. Entirely incomparable.
Calling my post bad faith just because it’s a different perspective than you is itself a bad faith accusation.
What’s bad-faith is the idea that you’re comparing a company with nearly a thousand full-time employees and almost 15 years of history in a single game and with much higher costs and money-grubbing dark patterns and calling it more worthy than games with individual devs and smaller dev teams with products that are cheaper, better looking, better feeling, and with better physics and more care and attention to the community.
War Thunder is an indie game project that got funding in 2020.
Incorrect. War Thunder has never, at any point, been an indie project except by the most particular of technicalities, and it’s been P2W for pretty well since release.
War Thunder is not and has never been a AAA game.
I didn’t say AAA, I said AAA-wannabe, and that’s pretty apparent from the behavior of Gaijin.
War Thunder is not and has never had a monopoly. Saying otherwise is bad faith.
There exists no games on the market that occupy the niche that War Thunder occupies in a way that could mark them as a direct competitor. World of Tanks comes close, as does IL-2, Enlisted, and ARMA, but those are only parts of the whole, and don’t occupy the “realism” niche in a similar way. Legally, perhaps not, but de facto, War Thunder has a monopoly on the market for its niche.
Sorry if you got upset reading my posts.
Apology accepted.
Don’t resort to personal attacks just because people state different perspectives.
It’s not personal. I just don’t like falsehoods. Sorry you took it personally.
bro beam is so under-rated!
@AlvisWisla I make public posts so that we can both be accountable.
Feel free to keep it that way.
I am not forcing you to DM.
If you don’t like it, feel free to not reply.
For those who can’t see it:
Yeah, sure WT is “worked on” constantly.
But that doesn’t mean it’s out of love for the game, or the players.
ATS is worthy because it’s worked on out of love for the game and its players. The dev actually, in good faith, communicates with its playerbase outside of “this is what we’re doing”.
Same with BeamNG. They actually work on the things that matter, and that matter to the players, instead of pumping out whale bait.
Pillars of Eternity devs are reworking the Infinity engine from scratch to accomodate new developments and hardware!
There are so many new, actually loved-on games released this year alone that even Baldur’s Gate 3 is going to have trouble being in the top 10!
War Thunder is going to just be written down as AAA-wannabe-slop at this rate, and we all know what the gaming community thinks about AAA games nowadays - corpo-slop, only played because of addicts and sweats and monopolization of the market.
Don’t act like I’m wrong, because you know I’m right.
The problem with the game is that it started very well, with its flaws, but they were reasonable for a new game. It gradually improved, but after a while, it stagnated completely, even getting worse. As I said some time ago, Gaijin seems to be running away from the problem, adding more and more premium vehicles, some poorly made maps, and fixing 40 bugs, of which only two are important, while adding 30 more, eight of which are significant. Besides that, the reports section is increasingly filled with unreviewed reports, or reports accepted but not approved, even though they are incredibly important. They’ve added mechanics that, while good in principle, have been implemented so poorly that they only generate more bugs, such as volumetric bullets and armor, the penetration and damage calculator, etc. The maps are getting worse and worse, becoming smaller and with excessive obstacles or urban environments.
Having played the game since the closed beta, I see that instead of making a game that players would enjoy, the developers have alienated veteran players and designed it to attract the kind of people they want in the game: complacent premium subscribers.
I’m waiting to see if any company releases a similar but more decent game so I can quit this one, just like I quit World of Tanks for World of Tanks.
Steel Aces seems to be promising, though it’s ground only.
We still play it
Less and less