I know, and I guess I didn’t explain what I meant with “Becoming less competitive”
By adding infantry Gaijin is splitting its resources into a new gamemode that, in all frankness, is highly likely going to be unable to compete with established FPS brands for player attraction and retention.
That is resources not spent on the parts of War Thunder that make it succesful, and hence it slows down the growth of that success, making the game less competitive because it is no longer investing as many resources on what makes it great and what is attracting the most new players.
Gaijin worked themselves into a corner with their current monetization policy.
They made top tier their cash-cow, and although I have of course zero knowledge about the financial state of the Snail, I doubt they would be able to stay afloat without that top tier income, or at the very least take a really big hit to profit.
As long as this stays this way and Gaijin does not reform its monetization policy, decisions like adding infantry will be logical from the perspective of the company, because they need to keep top tier monetization firing on all cylinders, at all times.
I’m not surprised at all that this new infantry mode is starting in the modern day. Not at all.
I sincerely hope this is the case, yes. And I will take your word on it for now.
But my reasoning came from a place of not knowing the ins and outs of the company. I don’t know if they’ve hired an entirely new team to work on infantry or split off parts of the teams working on naval/ground/air.
My statement applies mostly to the latter, of course, and not the former.