If you’re active on YouTube or any content creators social media platforms, you’ll have noticed a high influx of recent concerns regarding the health of war thunder and its player base. Probably some things along the line of:
- War Thunder is dying of slop
- The problem with war thunder
- Is War Thunder Really Dying
- Why I don’t play War Thunder (and Neither should you)
- War Thunder has a serious Problem
- War Thunder isn’t Dying, it’s already dead
Now, seeing as you probably understand the gist of the titles, wether you’ve seen any of these videos, or post, or not you can see quite a pattern.
Every creator has the same issue with the game, it’s always the same thing. The predatory marketing tactics, pricing, and time consumption of the game. People who have played the game, since day one. Even I, who have only been playing for about half of war thunders existence, see the issue too.
I’ll make a few short points and leave you to your thoughts. Most of them being fairly similar in opinions to a few content creators I really love and hold near and dear in my time of playing war thunder, and even before I got war thunder. I’d suppose the right thing to do is giving them credit, even though their opinions aren’t really opinions, they are simply stating the facts. Notably one being good ol’ Spookston, Phlydaily, and DollarPlays.
- War thunder (Gaijin Network Ltd) is predatory:
War Thunder, in its entirety is predatory. Then again, what F2P game isn’t. War Thunder takes this predation to the next level compared to any other rival however. The grind, the exclusivity, and cost of premiums are all a very serious issue, and a tool for taking in money. By the extension of the grind, adding more vehicles, and increasing the difficulty of gaining resource (RP & SL) they drag the grind out endlessly. Even with a premium account the amount of time to grind vehicles is insane. Completing this is the power of premium vehicles, ones that are blatantly overpowered, and overpriced to help maximize profit margins. Yes, I’m talking about the T-58 heavy, BMPT-72, Turm-III, Su-30’s, etc. These aren’t exclusive to now either, the KV-1B is notably another, as well as the SAV 20.
War Thunder has been specifically structured not only to be Pay 2 Progress, but also Pay 2 Win. You see, the business model is simple. You release an OP vehicle, have your CC’s do the hard work by showing how OP and easy to play they are. All the enthusiasts and kids whip out their credit card out of frustration of either the time to progress or dying to these vehicles, because if you can’t beat them, you join them of course. Then you stack not having them go on sale at all until a new vehicle overtakes their position in rank. A single premium vehicle at the top now costs more than a AAA game.
Now you have an understanding of the predatory tactics, you can move to the next big thing, which is the price creep.
- Premium price creep:
Over the years, more premiums have been added obviously. More ranks means more to add of course. The issue is, unlike the scaling of TT vehicle prices in SL and RP, the cost of these premiums have a non-slope based pricing. In other words, the price continues to rise the more they add. Instead of them decreasing over time in price with the introduction of new vehicles, they continue to grow. Unlike the TT vehicles, which of course, as more ranks and vehicle get added in front of them, have a RP requirement and SL cost net decrease.
Now that we have the big premium issue out of the way, we can talk about the other issue.
- Use of non-human creation:
In other words, the use of AI in game, in graphic design, and in other sectors. AI is taking jobs, which yet again comes down to Gaijin increasing their net profit margin. But cutting out the expensive graphic designer to create decals, textures, and graphics, they don’t have to pay anyone for every hour of work they complete.
Into another topic now.
- “Slopification” of war thunder:
Useless additions, mindless copy paste, overall shit being added. F-14D is a good example, it’s a plane that’s not even unique that’s being gatekept behind the paywall. Another example is the Senrai Maidens being the biggest, unholiest gooner addition to War Thunder to draw in a new crowd of players. Gaijin will find every way to cut corners, and costs, to be able to maximize their margin yet again. They make ‘new content’ that’s repackaged old vehicles, market it as such, and make profit because of the dopamine hit people get from using them to progress, while it functionally added nothing to the game. This causes a overall lack of growth of the game, remaining the same stupid repetitive game over all these years.
One last point I have to make, because I simply can’t do this anymore.
- The Ultimatum theory:
Players, as such, will not be able to do anything to control this without boycotting the game, dropping its numbers, and essentially starving the beast. Every time players have outraged, gaijin has treated us as children, giving us an ultimatum, overall by using forced choice theory. Every time the people push back enough they give a choice of two things. They implant the idea that it’s what you wanted all along in your brain, and you become complacent for some time. They know psychology, they know marketing. They know their flow of money won’t stop when they take small losses for the overall wins.
Players as a whole are the problem. They are the root of this issue. You feed the beast, so do you want to feed into this issue?
Overall, the reason I made this post was because of one thing I saw. The developer of GHPC! Made a very good statement on the issue without pointing fingers…
(Thank you to Czechmate for making an analysis & review with the GHPC! dev Q&A, who is the source of this screenshot.
