What is actually going on with War Thunder

There is an active argument in the War Thunder community right now. The recent flashpoint is a long critique video from a content creator named TheCodMineMan. In the video he discloses he is in Gaijin Entertainment's official content creator program, says he is risking that partnership by posting it, and calls on other creators in the program to follow with similar videos. They did. Within roughly twenty-four hours, PhlyDaily, a long-tenured War Thunder content creator with approximately 1.3 million subscribers, posted his own response video endorsing TheCodMineMan's timing and the structural parts of his analysis, while pushing back on the pessimism. He is not the only response in this space. Other content creators have been posting critique videos covering related concerns over the past months and, in several cases, years. At least one creator with a roughly two-year run of issue-by-issue documentation has used the current stretch of his videos to announce he is leaving War Thunder content entirely. Another creator from the same scene has built recent videos around the new Senrai Maidens premium tank packs and the use of generative AI in shipped game art. The discussion has also spread to Reddit and the Steam forums, alongside a separate thread from a former Gaijin community manager who has posted long allegations about internal company practices.

None of these threads are new on their own. Most of them are recurring patterns in the War Thunder community that go back years. The combination this month is loud enough that it is worth explaining the shape of, especially for readers who do not play the game and have only seen a piece of it cross their feed.

What follows is not a comprehensive review. We have not played the infantry mode (still in closed beta as of June 2026), and we are not in the official Gaijin content program. What we can do is lay out what is in the current dispute, where it came from, and where the evidence lands.

The game

War Thunder is a free-to-play vehicle combat game made by Gaijin Entertainment. It launched in 2012. It is one of the most detailed games of its category in the world. Players fight in aircraft, ground vehicles, and ships, across more than two thousand individually modelled real-world military vehicles spanning roughly a century of military history. Each vehicle is modelled to a level the larger vehicle-simulation games do not match. The underlying ballistics, armour penetration, and aerodynamics are simulated rather than scripted.

The game is also a free-to-play live service. Players grind to unlock vehicles. Premium accounts speed the grind. Premium vehicles can be bought with real money. The economic structure is the thing the community has fought Gaijin about, on and off, for over a decade. The fight is not about whether the game should have monetisation. It is about where the lines fall and whether they move toward or away from the player.

What the 2023 review bomb was, and was not

The most-cited precedent for the current moment is May 2023. Gaijin announced a "rank-based economy" rework that would raise costs for vehicles at Rank III and higher across repair, ammunition, and modifications. The community read the change as Gaijin worsening the grind to push premium accounts. A review-bombing campaign hit the game's Steam page. At its peak, around 93 percent of recent reviews on Steam were negative, as reported by Game World Observer at the time.

On May 19, 2023, Gaijin reversed the planned changes. On June 14, it published a public roadmap committing to specific economic improvements. PC Gamer, PCGamesN, and Kotaku all covered the cycle in detail. The roadmap was partially implemented over the following year. Some items were delivered. Some were delayed without further announcement. Some did not happen. This is the typical outcome for a roadmap-after-revolt at any live-service publisher.

It is worth being clear that the 2023 review bomb is not what is happening right now. The current situation is, at the time of writing, a wave of YouTube videos from named content creators (TheCodMineMan and PhlyDaily are the most-watched of them so far), plus discussion spreading to Reddit and the Steam forums, plus some publicly cancelled premium subscriptions. It is not, so far, a coordinated Steam review campaign. The leverage shape TheCodMineMan proposed is organised around selective spending rather than review-bombing. Whether the moment becomes a Steam campaign depends on choices that have not been made yet.

The classified documents pattern

One thing about this community: players keep posting actual classified military documents on the official forum to argue about vehicle modelling accuracy. Sixteen-plus incidents since 2021 by the most-cited count, covering vehicles from the Challenger 2 to the F-117, typically Distribution Statement C material restricted to US Government agencies. Sharing them publicly is illegal. Gaijin removes them when they appear. The leaks are not part of the current argument; they are context for the audience. The intensity that produces them is the same intensity that produces the critique videos.

What the current critique is actually about

The discussion converges on six items. Different creators frame them differently, but the items overlap:

1. Content updates have thinned, with copy-paste vehicles, AI-assisted assets, and higher-volume premium content filling the gap.
2. The famous-vehicle backlog the studio has been mining is now finite and visibly thinning.
3. The infantry mode in closed beta is not at the polish level of an established shooter.
4. Naval has been the weakest mode in the game for years.
5. Gaijin's public communication during contentious periods reads as defensive rather than dialogue-shaped.
6. The crisis-to-review-bomb-to-roadmap-to-partial-implementation pattern, which produced the 2023 reversal, has not produced durable change in the underlying model.

The most-cited recent framing is TheCodMineMan's "novelty treadmill": the argument that War Thunder for about a decade was sustained not by core gameplay strength but by a constant drip of new vehicles, a brutal grind, and fear of missing out, and that the model is under strain because the backlog has thinned. He gives the resulting fill content the name "slop": copy-paste vehicles, premium volumes that have risen, and generative-AI assets including a now-discussed incident in which a Gemini watermark was not removed from a shipped texture. The Gemini incident is referenced independently by other War Thunder creators. The studio's stated explanation, as cited by the creators, is outsourcing-studio error; we have not independently verified the chain of attribution.

PhlyDaily's response uses a parallel metaphor. War Thunder is the same cake it has been since launch, with twelve or thirteen years of icing (new vehicles, new meta, new ammunition) layered on top. The foundation has not changed. His structural point lands where TheCodMineMan's does: the icing strategy is no longer sustainable, which forces Gaijin to either rebuild the foundation or watch the structure collapse. PhlyDaily is explicit about scope. He plays at battle rating 8.7 and below, has not seriously played top tier in years, and does not comment on what he does not play. His in-scope concerns are bomber damage models, the copy-paste pattern (which he says has erased the distinct national character that used to define the game), and the mixing of conventional and non-conventional ammunition at lower battle ratings. On naval, which he calls "the elephant in the room," PhlyDaily treats it as a known and unfixed problem and points readers at an earlier video he made about it. TheCodMineMan covers the same ground in his own video. His initial position was that naval should be removed entirely; he later walked that back to "the current version should be replaced." Both creators flagging naval is why the list above carries it as a standing concern.

Two specific cases sit under the structural argument. The first is the Nuclear Thunder game mode, an April Fools event that briefly restored older-style air combat with respawnable airfields, AI ground units that mattered, and a structure that gave ground-attack aircraft real purpose. Multiple creators say the mode was briefly popular, then follow-up changes (anti-air adjustments, rewards changes) reduced its playability. Gaijin has since said on a developer stream that the mode will return in a form aimed at top-tier aircraft. The second case is the Senrai Maidens premium pack series, which applies anime-character themes and voice-over crews to existing tank chassis. Creators raising these treat them as the surface example: heavily-marketed cosmetic content shipped on top of templates the player base already paid for.

TheCodMineMan's follow-up comment also walks back his blanket dismissal of copy-paste premiums and narrows the video's framing more broadly. The description used the word "dying"; the follow-up clarifies he means "stagnating." He explicitly does not call for review-bombing. The leverage shape he proposes is a four-point plan: spend selectively, direct feedback to surfaces the studio actually reads (Gaijin's forums and specific Steam reviews), unify the message rather than scatter it, and keep criticism aimed at the studio's decisions rather than at individual developers, with an explicit instruction against harassment. The plan is what the video is trying to produce, and its specificity is what differentiates it from a typical "state of the game" rant.

The critic side is not unified on tactics. Three loose camps. TheCodMineMan represents the organised-plan camp above. A second camp argues that the 2023 review-bomb playbook will not work a second time because Gaijin will have had three years to prepare a response strategy, and that any current campaign will produce another apology and partial roadmap that does not change the underlying model. A third camp, articulated most explicitly by PhlyDaily, is more optimistic: the diagnosis is right, but the depletion of the famous-vehicle backlog is forcing Gaijin to confront foundation problems whether the community campaigns or not. His phrasing is "I don't think I'm as pessimistic as COD." We have no confident prediction about which is right. The reader should know the critic side is not unified on what to do, only on what is broken.

The former employee allegations

Running parallel to the creator-side discussion is a separate thread. A former Gaijin community manager, Evgeny Kononenko, who used the handle Keofox while at the company, has posted long Reddit threads making several allegations about internal Gaijin practices. WN Hub aggregated the posts in a single article.

The allegations include claims about internal data security, claims about treatment of Russian-speaking employees inside the company, and a claim that Gaijin manipulated Steam reviews by triggering an in-game review prompt only after positive in-game moments (wins, prize drops). The Steam review-prompt claim is one that some players have publicly said they noticed the same pattern of, although we have not independently confirmed the pattern at scale. The internal data security and HR claims are one-sided allegations from a former employee, with no public response from Gaijin captured in the reporting we can find.

We mention these because they are part of the current discussion and they are influencing how some players read the rest of the situation. We are not endorsing them or dismissing them. A reader weighing the current argument should know they exist and that they are contested.

What Gaijin has actually done

It is also worth being clear about what Gaijin has run for the last fourteen years.

The studio has shipped a free-to-play vehicle simulation game continuously since 2012 at a level of detail that almost no other studio in the world attempts. It runs ongoing cheat enforcement and posts public fair-play reports; the June 2026 update disclosed 2,880 banned accounts. The 2023 economy reversal happened, the roadmap was published, and parts of it were delivered. The current content cadence is the Heavy Cavalry major update, with vehicle previews going up on the official news page through May and June 2026 at roughly the same rate as previous years.

It is also fair to note where Gaijin's communication has not been keeping pace. The most recent post in the "Community Update" series, where the studio responds at length to player feedback threads, was Community Update No. 8 in October 2025. That post was mostly about subtree planning (the distribution of Singaporean vehicles across multiple national trees and similar additions for Israel, Japan, and China). The roughly eight months since, on the dimension of substantive long-form community communication, are visible to anyone reading the news page. New vehicle previews are not the same product as a long-form response to community concerns, and the current critique is in part about exactly that distinction.

None of that is the same as saying every recent content update has been good or bad. The accurate picture is a studio that is, in some areas, behind its own roadmap promises, and in other areas, actively engaging on the parts of the game (new content, anti-cheat enforcement) that are easier to ship than long-form community communication.

Our honest read

This is a committed read, not a "both sides" shrug. Two findings, and neither cancels the other. We land where we do because the evidence supports it.

On the substance, the community has more of the case than the loudest defenders of Gaijin allow. That is a judgment about the balance of who is right on the items in dispute, not a claim that Gaijin is wrong about everything. The items (naval, infantry, premium vehicles in matchmaking, balance-update pace, communication tone) are not new. They are the same items across update cycles, across multiple creators (including one with over a million subscribers and several years of similar critique already on record), and across forum threads that go back years. When the same set of grievances returns this consistently and the people raising it are paid by the studio to make content for it, the most defensible reading is that the grievances are tracking real things, not a coordinated tantrum.

On the conduct, the community is also part of why the cycle does not produce durable change. This is reasoning we are arguing for, not a documented finding. Review-bomb campaigns can extract concessions in the short run while reshaping what a studio learns from feedback in the long run: a company that learns "the audience will review-bomb if we change the wrong thing" has incentives to communicate defensively rather than engage. The 2023 cycle is consistent with this. It produced a reversal and a partial roadmap but not a different relationship between Gaijin and its players, and three years later the same loop is running. Other readings (ownership decisions, revenue priorities, internal organisation factors) are also consistent with the data and we cannot rule them out from the outside. We are arguing for the incentive reading because it is the most explanatory of the pattern, not because we have a study that proves it.

We do not know what comes next. The 2023 precedent suggests Gaijin will respond if pressure crosses a threshold, and that the response will be partial. That is a guess, not a finding. The piece worth writing in six months is the one that checks this paragraph against what actually happened.