The other night I dreamed of great floods and mercurial water lapping against the battlements of a castle I most certainly don’t own in real life, and awoke to a series of cataclysmic booms. It turns out the sound I heard was that of War Thunder, heralding its three millionth player. That’s three million players, pointing planes at tanks in the best MMO you’ve never heard of.
War Thunder has grown more than 200% since March 5, my birthday, when Mr One Million ascended to the game’s cacophonous cloud.
Developer and publisher Gaijin Entertainment have done that entertaining sort of maths where you add the exploits of all of your players together for pleasingly ridiculous results. So we learn that a thousand million units have been destroyed over more than 600 billion deployments since War Thunder’s open beta began on January 28. What’s more, 3,500 years of air time have been logged by the game’s either extremely large or extremely aged collection of pilots.
Gaijin CEO Anton Yudintsev said that the rapidly acquired playerbase is a “great responsibility” that the development team “will not take lightly.”
“We have dedicated ourselves to continue to support our existing War Thunder fans base by providing ongoing updates to the game and its community features,” he said. “We will also continue to expand War Thunder’s gameplay by adding ground forces.
“We want to thank all of our players and we will continue our ongoing dialogue with our community members to ensure that we provide and improve the features they find most important.”
One of War Thunder’s many wise and wizened pilots is recently-retired PCGamesN bot Paul Dean, who loved it to bits back in January. Imagine how much he must be loving it now, with Oculus Rift support and all those other fogey frequent flyers about. Sign up for open beta on the game’s official site.