Mythbusting | Is War Thunder dying?

Game Discussion General Discussion
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For this, I will be using Steam charts alone for player count, as they are much easier to come by and took less time to collect.

(Source)

I’ve heard many a rumors war thunder, and the ’game species’ as a whole are dying out. I, honestly, with the recent and heavy burnout I have had a suspicion these games are. To my surprise, that is, wildly incorrect.

While there are fluctuations in data due to player availability to play the game, I will only be looking at Peak player count to the next all time high. I will take a ’year in review’ at the end of each year.

2013 SPC

August; 2013 Steam Playercount: 4.1K

September; 2013 Steam Playercount: 7.5k

Year in Review: The game is just beginning its long run to almost 12 years to now, and as most new projects do, not gain a significant amount of traction in its early steps

2014 SPC

May; 2014 Steam Playercount: 10.8k

Year in Review: The game has gained popularity and started to gain a bigger amount of attention from players due to its f2p nature, while only having the highest amount of players in 1 month and drastically dropping after, by around 4k, then re-rising to 10k in December shows players are keen and interested in new content.

2015 SPC

Jan; 2015 Steam Playercount: 11k

Feb; 2015 Steam Playercount: 13k

Mar; 2015 Steam Playercount: 14k

Year in review: The game has gained more players and popularity new content keeps bringing players back, however, the game stalls on the Steam platform, this being its all time high Playercount for the next 5 years, that’s right 5 years. Until march of 2020 when there are some massive changes.

2020 SPC

Mar; 2020 Steam Playercount: 20k

April; 2020 Steam Playercount: 24.7k

Nov; 2020 Steam Playercount: 28k

Year in Review: A massive spike of 6k players on the Steam platform flood into the game for what I consider the more modern era of War Thunder. I started playing war thunder in early 2021, participating in Hot Tracks and Xiwa Strike, the first major update of 2021, which we will soon see big spikes.

2021 SPC

Feb; 2021 Steam Playercount: 28.6k

Mar; 2021 Steam Playercount: 30k

Year in review: While not having a large amount join War Thunder in this year, it was vital to the development and future of War Thunder, and shows a slow exponential decay in joining member so far, but most certainly is not the end of the story.

2022 SPC

Mar; 2022 Steam Playercount: 39k

Apr; 2022 Steam Playercount: 43.6k

Nov; 2022 Steam Playercount: 48.6k

Dec; 2022 Steam Playercount: 49.8k

Year in review: A massive spike in playercount by almost 20k, that’s a gigantic 60% increase to the Playercount, and is yet the highest we’ll see but will be for a bit after this next round.

2023 SPC

Jan; 2023 Steam Playercount: 56k

Feb; 2023 Steam Playercount: 60.6k

Apr; 2023 Steam Playercount: 63.2k

Dec; 2023 Steam Playercount: 65.7k

Year in review: A massive growth in players yet again, and we will soon see a spike and plateau in its current growth, however, this doesn’t represent all other platforms than Steam.

2024 SPC

Jan; 2024 Steam Playercount: 66k

Feb; 2024 Steam Playercount: 70k

Year in review: While the game gained a lot of players, there are no new all time high player counts above 70k on Steam. Sadly, while I can say growth is stalling for Steam, the other data may not echo the same tune.

ALL IN ALL

Is the game dying, no. Is it beginning to stagnate or create mass exodus of players due to burn out, or lack of time or priorities over other resources and entertainment methods, yes.

Here is the massive question though, can gaijin pull in new and existing players into and back to the game, well, yes, they absolutely have the power and ability to. How? Well, honestly a great start is debugging, cleaning up the spaghetti code, fix server lag/desync issues and visuals, and most importantly, ask the players what they want instead of force feeding them slop or what the vocal minority wants.

I can implore a thousand times in my heart what all longer standing war thunder players want, they don’t want flashy updates, they don’t need hella complex new features, we want fixes and improvements to the current game, and when that’s done, throwing in some new goodies wouldn’t be frowned upon if time and assets allow.

I think what this game has is one of a kind, and beautiful, and I don’t want it to fade away to whatever motives there are in place. I can also most certainly say the community is one of a kind too, but some of that isn’t in a great light, so I’ll move the spotlight somewhere else. We love the game, we want to see it flourish into something special and non-conforming to other games around right now. I’ll leave it at that, hope it was a good read, maybe you agree, maybe you don’t, maybe you won’t reply, and this might sift to the bottom of the pile and never see daylight again, have a good rest of your day people.

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Yeah, not happening.

I just need one game like War Thunder to give up everything I’ve played in this game and go to something else, better graphics, vehicle, game overall, community and developer-player relationship and communication.

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How did ppl play WT on Steam in 2013?

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was on steam at least late in 2013.

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There is literally zero competition unless you like sim games. DCS/IL2 are leagues ahead of sim here, but if gaijin just tried a little bit they could at least have something sort of competitive, maybe not in the fidelity department, but certainly something sim-lite like SQUAD is to ARMA.

For tank sim you are absolutely cooked and the only thing that comes close is SQAUD/'44/HLL if you are looking for that, but these are not pure tank games, and you sort of need 2 other friends to play, and you aren’t even guaranteed to get into these vics on a random server, and the damage model is a mix of WT and WoT HP bars unfortunately.

Any project that tries to dethrone WT without insane amounts of funding is fated to die before it gets any legs, because this game will cannibalize it, due to having so much more content, and 10+ years of sunk cost. This is pretty much what happens in gaming in general, only company that came in and competed with a juggernaut was RIOT with valorant, marvel rivals sort of, but OW was long dead by then. Which is why like 80% of the most popular games right now are basically ancient.

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Firstly, the comparison is… for steam?
Gradually more people use steam as a platform in a time span of 12 years.
When you compare , you’d better have in game data.
Feb 24 , is WT’s record for active users at 250K .
We are 26/4/25 and you see 190k by the time i’m writing … which is ok number with nothing particularly interesting going on.
BP is ok for the people that may want the vehicles (me) but it’s not something special.
Event with Meteor is nothing special as well .
So , it is …ok-ish. I guess.

I don’t think there is a mythbusting to be done. The game is not about to die , at least by those numbers.
You know what can make a game die? Revenue…
Active users etc. in a free game say nothing. It’s more of a marketing number.
The payers , the revenue keeps the game working and
the sponsors or other deals between companies…
Certainly not the players that have an account or play a free to boot game.

The only thing.
It doesn’t really have a rival.
Now, if a rival comes…and especially of western origin , yes WT will die. In mere moments.
People may like the idea of WT, they love what the game can be (even if it’s not) , the potential of the game is amazing with so many vehicles etc. BUT they don’t like GJ . Very few people like GJ as a company .

Not really, because that’s the thing…WT doesn’t have content. Just models. If some company copy-pastes 1/3 of the models and gives gameplay , they won.
Content is not only “models” … content is variety of missions, having PvE and PvP , maybe stories (yes they can do a freakin story and play with the vehicles , like Ace Combat missions but more realistic and online! ) . The potential is infinite…
Yet next patch will be the same , "we brought Su-96 and F-415 that can shoot missiles out of their a…s!! Oh, and you’ll still play the same maps which is baptized ground strike/operation …but it’s a deathmatch!! "

And we (me included) will still play because no alternative , unless i go and buy everything it needs to play DC’s and invest even more time (that i don’t have) to learn to … fly at DCs.
While WT is still realistic enough and based in real data etc. , it’s easier to play and in controls. You don’t have to learn every button.

Edit: Also, the playerbase in WT currently in terms of quality is way worse than it was in 2013-2015…
And that says many things about what would happen if a “rival” appeared in the horizon.

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  • is Warthunder dying?

this is a question that has been asked since day one, 12 years ago

it has been roaming around since then and never went away,

so let’s answer it ourselves, in a way that everyone here can test!

  • if you boot up the game, are the official Servers still running?
  • if you want to play a match, can you find one?
  • if you check the update logs, are there recent updates?

did you just say yes 3 times? now 4 times? that’s what I thought

so no it’s not dying, and no annoying game mechanic is gonna change that

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None of us that started in 2013 play or have played on steam

Steam numbers mean nothing

Steam counts you as active if you just log in for minute to collect daily log in

Number of bots in the game ,on all BR’s /in all modes suggest that Gaijin is padding up numbers .

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People have been pulling the “its dying” claim for years and it keeps on going.

Lot of it is the rose-tinted glasses effect, lot of people claiming “Fox3’s/ATGM’s/Radar/etc is killing the game”.

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Steam is the only way to get player numbers for any game, devs stopped doing that in like the 2000’s because investors are more impressed by some corpo speak meaningless “active users” which games can inflate. Saying you have 1 million monthly users sounds better than 20k concurrent player peaks.

For games that are not only on steam, the steam data is at least useful for seeing trends. And either way the numbers on steam for WT are impressive. Even more impressive than the player count is the fact WT has been in the top like 20 of sales data/chart for literally years, and anyone with half a brain doesnt use steam to make purchases for this game which means gaijin is making an absolute fortune on this game.

Where the money goes who knows? I really hope its not all being invested into their other projects because most of these are failing. Active matter and enlisted are the only ones they published that aren’t pure shovelware. Enlisted had a shot but its practically dead now, and would have been better to just have that content in WT (inf TT), maybe active matter will do well? I really hate the trend of these studios using their cash cow games to do this, gaijin is not alone in this.

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flat out next to impossible

War thunder is a online version of a single player game (all the solo missions are literally ported over from it) gaijin made a few years earlier, which in itself borrowed engine code, assets and systems from older xbox 360/ps3 games which were for the most part ports of early-mid 2000s IL2 sequel games gaijin worked on, cleaning up near to a quarter of a century of old code would take so long it would be better to start new entirely. This would take years of continuous work to get to the same level as we are seeing from WT today so just is not feasible

All games die eventually, I see war thunder likely making it to the 20 year mark so don’t worry for another half decade

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Pretty cool! Can you also find the player count that only launch the game from WT launcher directly like me? Last time I played WT from steam was YEARS ago because WT launcher is much faster to open WT itself

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I’m going to say it once again: War Thunder is feasting on the body — the playerbase — of WoT. Also, Steam player counts are very real. Like, take Unturned for example — highly botted. I’m not saying it’s bots here, I’m just throwing that out there.

The other thing is the high influx of new players and the loss of ‘skilled players’ — the ones who actually participate in the community. I believe we’re seeing a kind of brain drain in War Thunder. I don’t want to go on and on about the impact of that, but honestly, this could be a planned move by Gaijin: to create a softer, less engaged fanbase, like mobile games, in order to monetize it more and more

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Glad someone else can use their mental capacity to understand.

Also forgot about aces of thunder. I used to play enlisted in its early access, but after gaijin really took over the game, you could tell, and I didn’t enjoy it as much anymore tbh.

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Afaik, there is no way, or no saved data from solely launcher users, that data would only be available from gaijin themselves.

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That’s kind of the point of the article, because many are saying the game is dying and it’s all gaijins fault.

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Statistics.

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you also need to remember that in 2024 they removed the server they used for AI for the in game lobby fills so make the 2024 about a good 20k less due to 3rd party software use

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That’s not really how Steam counts players. They count active users with an actual profile, not to mention Steam’s only method of ‘botting’ is trade botting through accounts with a hacking method to make money from people who have funds in their Steam wallet.