Marketing Manipulation (with sources)
**War Thunder's claimed player counts are not what they appear.** In-game, the counter shows 100,000+ players "online" — yet the actual matchmaking queue for Air Arcade on the NA server shows fewer than 200 people waiting, and individual lobbies regularly fill with bots to reach player count minimums. A 12-player lobby with only 6 real humans is not an edge case — it's the norm. The math from Gaijin's own queue screens does not reconcile with the numbers they display, and they have never publicly defined what "online" actually counts.
**Gaijin has a documented, financial reason to keep it this way.** Bot accounts — scripted programs running on real Steam or Gaijin accounts — count toward the online player counter and pay real money for premium vehicles and currency to grind faster. Gaijin profits from them while doing nothing meaningful to stop them. This has been confirmed across Naval, Air, Ground, and Helicopter modes by thousands of players on Steam and Gaijin's own forums. Removing bots would cut both their revenue and their publicly displayed player numbers simultaneously.
**A former Gaijin employee of 13 years confirmed the company manipulates perception metrics.** Community Manager Yevgeny Kononenko (Keofox) went public in 2024 stating that Gaijin artificially inflated Steam ratings, engineered review prompts to only appear after victories, and suppressed those prompts for Chinese players who leave critical reviews. When players have filed legal complaints, Gaijin ignores lawyers entirely. When 65,000 negative Steam reviews exposed their 2023 economy scandal, they removed Steam from their official website and had the reviews buried. This is a company with a consistent, documented pattern of manipulating how healthy and popular they appear.
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**Sources — search these exactly in Google to find each one:**
- `Keofox Gaijin Entertainment disarray fired developers internal systems` — Game World Observer article, April 2026
- `War Thunder Gaijin fraud warning Steam discussions TheySaidMew` — Steam community thread on legal complaints being ignored
- `Gaijin Entertainment Wikipedia` — see the 2023 economy scandal and Steam removal section
- `War Thunder bots clarify Steam discussions 2023` — Steam thread confirming bot accounts count toward online numbers
- `Naval has a serious bot account problem War Thunder forum` — Official Gaijin forum thread, December 2025
- `Bots in ARB War Thunder official forum` — Official Gaijin forum thread, October 2023
- `Live player count War Thunder official forum` — Gaijin forum thread where players do the math proving the numbers don't add up
- `warthunder has become PUBG Steam discussions` — Steam thread documenting Gaijin's financial incentive to keep bots