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War Thunder is Dying of Slop.

TheCodMineMan

609,448 views

War Thunder is dying, and not for the reason most people think. After [10+] years playing it, here's what's actually killing the game, the receipts to back up every claim, and what we can still do to save it.

In this video I break down how Gaijin's Killing War Thunder. Endless new vehicles, a brutal grind, copy-paste premiums, and constant monetization slowly turned War Thunder into low-effort slop, why the playerbase shares part of the blame, and the realistic, community-driven fixes that could actually turn it around. Full timestamps below. This is criticism from someone who loves this game and wants it to survive.

A good-faith critique and analysis of the current state of War Thunder in [2026].

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
⏱ TIMESTAMPS
0:00 — Intro
0:43 — [Prologue: three things]
2:30 — [The novelty treadmill]
4:08 — [Why you should trust me]
5:07 — [Layer 1: the gameplay was always thin]
7:36 — [Layer 2: the treadmill / economy]
9:34 — [Layer 3: the content went bad]
11:17 — [Layer 5: the neglect]
13:20 — [The part that's on us]
15:21 — [The plan: how we actually move Gaijin]

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20 Comments

@TheCodMineMan Creator 3 months ago (edited) Pinned

EDIT: I should have said “delete naval in its current state” not remove it entirely. Naval is in a bad state, but boat lovers deserve love too. I apologize

This is not my normal style of video, this took weeks of scripting, planning, researching, and excecuting. If you agree with my points, consider sharing this to someone inside the War Thunder community. I hope Gaijin recieves this well, I have been anxious to release the video, but I feel like I have to.

Thanks for watching.

Edit: I hate Reddit lmao. This is not doom posting, this is not a cheap way to get views, I spent a long time researching and editing this. this is how frustrated I have felt over 14 years.

@Kyiw420 3 months ago

If gaijin takes you out of the partner program we should already know they’re done listening to us.

@OddBawZ 3 months ago

Gemini Entertainment are cancelling your decal with this one.

@Spookston 3 months ago

A lot of my older videos were aimed at identifying issues in War Thunder and offering feedback on how they could be improved, but I stopped making them because it was essentially shouting into the void. Even the feedback channel in the content creator Discord feels like it prints out directly into a shredder. The closest contact I've been able to have with a developer is through a community manager, and I was told "We don't believe that this round (XM885) could perform like that" despite providing evidence that it could. That's the story for a lot of bug reports. The developers are incredibly stubborn and only really care when the revenue stream is affected, but the playerbase is too fractured and passive to create effective change in that regard. As we've seen, too many people are happy to waste their paychecks buying the same vehicles over and over when a couple backups would suffice. The issues people complain about are so myriad that they end up drowning each other out or defocusing attempts to fix the largest issues. Live service games like War Thunder depend on a constant influx of new players to replace the old ones and stay afloat, but onboarding is so harsh and the developers would rather spend much of their money on advertising rather than fixing the core experience that makes those new players quit in the first place.

@avreve 3 months ago

Nuclear Option is fraction of the price of a wt premium

@OddBawZ 3 months ago

By the way, like I said on the last "review bomb" thing. Don't review bomb, just write an honest review on Steam. It's not a review bomb if it's how you really feel.

@knebber 3 months ago

Never forget the fact Gaijin outright removed the American and Japanese historical campaigns because they couldn't be bothered enough to fix the AI.

@seanowheels 3 months ago

The premiums being more expensive than a game is such hardcore BS too

@Lance_675 3 months ago

Supercell and Rovio, they had to learn the hard way…

@Bad_Karma0407 3 months ago

at this point, I no longer care about the partnership, the well being of the game and my audience playing it matters more

@DEFYN 3 months ago

Facts brother, spit ur shit fr

@worgan744 3 months ago

one of the things that hurt me so much with war thunder is that we got people compiling amazing bug reports with 10s of sources for the information and instead of reading the report or improving it? "not enough info" or "devs dont believe this is correct" what is the point of us giving them information with reliable sources if they either wont read it or say "nah we dont feel thats correct"

@Nickthedirt1 3 months ago

Commenting for algorithm boost. Good video, man speaking the truth

@tankdestroyer-722 3 months ago

"We do not want our players buying their way to the top" 1 second later adds 500 top tier premiums

@davidmladenov1763 3 months ago

I would probably have spent this money on some copy-paste slop next sale otherwise, but this is a much better use for it. Thanks for standing up to the snail and helping us have our voices be heard. Huge kudos to you cod, cheers!

@I-goofy-l 3 months ago (edited)

Im glad that some of the big content creators are addressing these issues, despite the risk of them potentially being expelled from the creator program

@itsbrate5000 3 months ago (edited)

TheCodMineMan will be mentioned as patient zero in the history books for the ultimate cure or downfall of war thunder!

@PhlyDaily 3 months ago

brother this is amazing. i agree withalmost everything other than that you didnt talk about train development time. but for real. this is what alot of us old guards had been saying forever. just got a tired of saying it. felt like yelling into a well. we made some changes back in the day but war thunder still had the hype vehicles to cushion the blow. now they dont't, its way more obvious how nothing burger this game is without enw stuff.